


False Front

by Corycides



Category: Revolution (TV)
Genre: Almost Human crossover, Multi, Revo Redux Challenge
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-03-18
Updated: 2015-05-16
Packaged: 2018-01-16 04:41:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 26
Words: 48,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1332316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Corycides/pseuds/Corycides
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In 2029, the Matheson Republic is the only safe place in the powerless wasteland that used to be America. Beyond the Wall the world has dropped back into feudalism. Inside, Matheson-tech provides everything the citizens could need. Human life is so respected that police force has implemented a new policy: every human police officer is paired up with a lifelike combat-model android.</p><p>Which sounds like a great idea, right? Yeah, there was a time Charlie Matheson thought so too.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Ashamed to Die

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Penndragon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Penndragon/gifts), [AvaRosier](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AvaRosier/gifts).



5.00 am. The alarm went off, gull-strident voices of the latest wall-rock borg-band shattering off the bare plaster walls of the apartment. Everything hurt. It took a second to flick of the alarm; ten minutes to drag the collection of scars and mends they called a body out of bed.

The apartment was new. It hadn’t seemed worth decorating it. New stuff didn’t matter and the old stuff - it all had memories attached. A fresh pot of syn-tea brewed on the side, slowing colouring in the narrow brew tube. That was one extra that was worth the trouble of caring about.

The thing lay on the table: blue glowing though the gloss-white synthetic skin as it charged. It was on its back - the fingers curled into its palm and the monofilament weave flexed tight over the joints. Like a dead spider.

User friendly, they called it, state of the art. The result of being lucky enough to have connections.

Charlie stood in front of the table, long legs braced against the persistent feeling of being off-balance, and stared at the thing, trying to think of it as her arm. Just detached and cold, plastic and monofilament instead of bone and skin. Fucking thing.

‘Fucking thing,’ she repeated out loud. ‘Fucking therapists.’

It didn’t need to be ‘her’ arm and she didn’t need to ‘rewrite the mind-map of her body’. The arm was a tool, that was all. It was like her gun and her squad-car - just something that let her function as a cop. Like the pain pills and anti-rejection meds and enforced psych-evals every other week.

Means to an end.

She dragged her t-shirt clumsily over her head, tossing it in the vague direction of the hamper. The bright over-head lights weren’t kind. Charlie made herself look at the scars. She didn’t remember them. She’d no linear memory of wounds and scabbing and the relief of healing to offset the jarring clot of twisted white scar-tissue. Last thing she remembered was a body that worked and a left arm that ran from her shoulder right down to her fingertips. Then she woke up in a hospital bed and it was gone.

Traumatic transhumeral amputation, the doctor’s called it. There was a whole history of her arm in her medical files. She’d read it more than once. The wrist disarticulation had occurred during the incident, a hollow point round just blowing it off her arm. Then a transradial amputation to excise damaged bone and flesh, followed by an unresponsive infection that - once the doctors were done and permissions signed - left her with a freckled stump, the end puckered with white scarred stitches.

Apparently that - waking up to the done deal of a severed, healed arm - was why she couldn’t accept her new arm. She couldn’t quite escape the feeling that her own arm had been stolen away in the night.

Charlie thought it was because it was her mother’s signature on the medical forms, and you couldn’t trust that bitch as far as you could throw her.

Just a tool. She picked up the arm - grimacing as it tapped into her nervous system and twitched to gruesome life - and shoved her stump into the padded bed roughly. It didn’t hurt - that’s what everyone told her. The interface had been embedded when she was in a coma - interface was a pretty word for systemic nanite infection - and the connection with the arm should be ‘seamless’. Charlie didn’t care what they said. She could feel the itch and prick of them against her skin - like the world’s worst case of pins and needles.

At the end of the arm, the fingers flinched and clenched. Relaxed again. Charlie ran through her morning systems-check of calisthenics. Well, one - grasping the brew tube to pour out a steaming hot mug. If it did that, Charlie figured, she could pull a trigger and punch things. All she really needed. She tossed back the brew, hissing away the heat of it, and headed for the bathroom. All she wanted.

_____________________________________

The MMPD home base was a shell-shaped sprawl of glass and steel in the heart of the City. Nano-tinted glass ran black under the sunlight, shinily reflective and faceted as a bug’s eye. It was an eye of sorts. Charlie flashed her reflection a tight smile as she strode across the courtyard.

‘Hi, mom,’ she mouthed, before shoving the doors open.

Inside the building smelled like ozone, aggressively refreshed air pumped in to cover the smell of blood, sweat and cordite that clung stubbornly to the plaster and tiles. Drones dropped from docks on the ceiling, scanning Charlie from head to toe. Her arm, left leg (stapled together with pins from shin to hip) and ribs (rebuilt of plastic and monofibre) warranted a second scan.

Reports. The world was built of reports.

Finally they beeped her access. Charlie shook her head and headed to the lifts, leaning back against the glass as she listened to the drone-beep of departmentally approved music. It was supposed to be soothing. It made her want to punch someone on principle.

It felt good to be back in uniform - the structured slate-grey doing more than all the cutting edge prosthetics in the world to hold her together. It had been six months since she was here - six months that she remembered - but it still felt like home. For the first time in a long time, she felt that old upswing of ‘I can do anything’ confidence. It felt good.

She pulled herself up straight, hooking her thumb into her belt. A grin tweaked the corner of her mouth as the lift bounced to a stop, the door opened and Charlie stepped out into...hell. It as like a gut punch, knocking all that stupid confidence out of her and leaving her sick and empty and sad.

Danny was everywhere she looked. Short blonde hair and an open, baby-fat soft face over slick, shell armour. Dead blue eye and a blank expression. Mama had tried to bring him back to life - over and over again - but all she got was a walking corpse.

‘Agent Matheson,’ one of the Danny’s said, walking towards her. He moved like she remembered, loose-limbed and ungainly. Oh god, she couldn’t bear it. His head cocked to the side - that was Danny - and stark white lines flashed under his skin. ‘I am your assigned partner, DN-192.’

Charlie laughed, a rough bark of sound. ‘Fuck that,’ she said. Glancing up she found the watchful drones in the corners. ‘Fuck you.’


	2. Chapter 2

‘Things change,’ Clayton said.

She closed the door and ran her finger down the glass, activating the reactive privacy polymers. The internal lights came up as the windows darkened. Charlie snorted and rubbed her hand, registering the pressure but the tactile feedback of skin on skin. Taking the place of her nerves, the nanites informed her of the contact but couldn’t convey sensation. It was disorienting sometimes.

‘No kidding,’ Charlie said dryly.

Clayton gave her a look - the ‘you are at the end of the slack I am willing to give you’ look - and rounded her desk, sitting down. She glanced at the computer, the rattle tap of her fingers firing off orders and replies, before turning her attention back to Charlie.

‘After your accident -’

‘It wasn’t an accident.’

‘If you could prove that. I probably wouldn’t have approved your return to duty. Matheson, your file has so many red flags it looks like it has its period.’  She flicked the report up from the desktop, eyes shifting from point to point. ‘PTSD, panic attacks -’

‘Haven’t had one of those -’ where anyone could see ‘in months.’

Clayton ignored the interruption. ‘Body dysmorphia. Aggression issues.’

‘Always had that.’

Ignored again. ‘Paranoia.’

Charlie slouched down in the chair, stretching her legs out until she could kick Clayton’s desk if she wanted. ‘Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.’

A swipe of Clayton’s hand sent the file flying out of sight. Her mouth was tight, creasing where her lips pressed together, and she leaned forwards, bracing her elbows on the desk. A finger jabbed at Charlie. ‘I’m taking a risk overruling the psychs and putting you back in the field, Matheson. I am not doing that because we are friends, because I think you are special or because I want to retire to a cushy job in your mother’s company. The reason I am doing this - the  only  reason I am doing it - is because you are the one person in this precinct I know isn’t compromised. So you will smile and be grateful and whatever trauma is gnawing at you, you will cork it down until we know who killed your uncle. Understood?’

‘Understood,’ Charlie said after a second. She sketched an empty smile over her face. ‘It’s nice to know you care.’

Clayton grimaced and leaned back, moving like she was older than she was. One hand rubbed her face. ‘I can’t afford to care. There are plenty of people who think I didn’t deserve to step into your uncle’s shoes. I can’t afford to be seen to make mistakes. So you can’t afford to be a mistake.’

‘Wow, it’s like you’re channeling my mom.’

That was crueller than Charlie had meant to be - old hurt like a slap in Clayton’s eyes. Back when she’d just been Nora, and Charlie’s favourite uncle’s favourite friend, she’d spent a lot of time fighting that particular old ghost. It also reached the end of Charlie’s allotted slack.

‘I am not your uncle, Matheson. You’ll treat me with respect, or I will slap you with  psych discharge so hard your memory will come back,’ she snapped, pulling herself up so straight it looked like it hurt. ‘After what went down in Delphi - you injured, your uncle dead, a full squad of our men dead, amnesiac or deserters? The boss decided that we needed a fail-safe, a way to make sure it never happened again. With a DNM replicant assigned to every Republic officer, we’ll always - at least - have a record of any disasters. So we’ll have at least one clue to start the investigation. Unlike our current situation. So yeah, your new partner is a bot. I know it’s not much of a replacement for Miles, but-’

Charlie shoved her hand through her hair - rough enough to hurt, to give her something to think about other than the wet roil of misery in her stomach - and spluttered out a laugh.

‘You think  that’s  what this is about?’ she asked. ‘You think I don’t want to replace Miles?’

‘Isn’t it?’

Charlie stood up - ignoring Clayton’s frown - and pulled her wallet out of her back pocket. It was new, fresh and clean - like the apartment and the trauma. She tugged out her id card and thumbed it to life. Or tried to. She always forgot sometimes, so used to that hand being her first resort. Switching hands she swiped it to life, the pattern of her fingers conjuring up a still from the stored video.

‘No,’ she said, dropping the card onto the desk. The image fluttered, stabalised. ‘It’s not.’

Caught on an impatiently held cam, a thumb smudging pink in the corners, a much younger, complete Charlie threw her arms around her little brother’s neck and kissed his head. It was only a week before he died, but you couldn’t have told. None of them had been able to tell. He looked well, able to go outside, able to eat cake and get noogied by his big sister.

‘My baby brother, Danny Matheson,’ she said. Her mouth twitched, not smiling. ‘DNM series, you see. I want...the truth, I want to know who did this to me. Not enough to ride shotgun with the zombie brother my crazy mom raised from the dead… over and over and over again. So it’s up to you.’

The clip reached the end - Danny trying to shove a cupcake into Charlie’s face - and looped. Clayton put her hand over it, muting the laughter. Her throat worked as she swallowed.

‘Your mother-’

‘Is my mom,’ Charlie interrupted. ‘I get to call her out, you don’t.’

Clayton nodded her acceptance of that. ‘I’ll see what I can do, Matheson. No promises. Until then, I’ll stick you on desk duty. Refamiliarise yourself.’

It was half a kindness and half a test. How much, Clayton wanted to know, did Charlie really hate the idea of riding with a DNM. Except hate wasn’t the problem. It was bad enough to lose someone you loved once, to lose them over and over again - every time you forgot the familiar lean of them was just a preprogrammed sub-routine. With Charlie’s sanity hanging on a psych-report, she couldn’t handle that.

So she slouched at her desk - still unclaimed, still where she’d left it, like the Jonah had rubbed off on it - and dragged two years of case reports from the cloud to her personal system. Gang activity in Delphi, terrorist incursions from over the Wall and the usual muggers, mobs and murderers. After three hours of eye-aching boredom Charlie swung round to hook one leg up onto the desk, glancing around the pit casually. No-one was looking at her so ferociously that it felt like everyone was looking at her. 

Jason looked up as her gaze swept over his desk and looked...sorry, awkward, resentful. Two years for him. Six months for Charlie.

‘Where’s Jason?’ she begged, vaguely remembering asking the question before and before that and before that. It felt like an echo in her head, but the answer had never stuck. ‘Is he alright? Was he hurt.’

Dr Foster grimaced a smile and patted Charlie’s shoulder, the good one. ‘Don’t worry about Lieutenant Neville. He’s fine. A few bruises is all. A day off and some painkillers and he was right as rain. Let’s worry about you, hmm?’

He had visited, to be fair. Charlie had seen the visitor’s logs. For months he’d come and sat by her bed, watching them trim away at her bit by bit. Then he’d stopped - life went on didn’t it? For him, anyhow.

Jason’s partner - in more ways than one - looked over. Her mouth tightened and she put a possessive hand on Jason’s arm. He dragged his attention back to her - and everyone  wasn’t  looking at Charlie even harder than before.

Might as well take advantage of the socially awkward black spot. Charlie flicked a quick glance at Clayton’s office - the glass was black still - and backdoored her way into Miles’ archived account. He’d always been rubbish at security - she knew all his passwords, knew all his hiding places. She’d been stupid enough to think that meant she knew  him.

That was old bitterness, though, and not productive - look at that, she  had  listened to the psychs bullshit. Charlie rough cloned it over to a private hive - private  enough,  the perils and privileges of being the daughter of the world’s sysadmin meant you knew how hard real privacy was - and then used Miles’ subroutines to access the closed/sealed files.

Clayton would have given them to her - maybe - but it was easier to ask forgiveness than permission, and you knew they’d not redacted anything for your ‘own good’. Or for someone elses ‘own good’. Back of her neck sweating now, Charlie strip-mined the files for info, reshelled them in her hive - music files, Rachel had always hated her taste in music - and dropped the originals back into Miles account.

It would be flagged, the account would be trip-wired, but hopefully they’d believe it was just schedules that hadn’t been properly wiped. And hopefully there was something in there that would make burning the asset worth it.

‘Damn you, Miles,’ she muttered, leaning back and pressing her hands to her eyes. ‘What the fuck were we doing?’

There was no answer. He was dead - presumed dead, because where else did he have to go? - and Charlie had to find the answers on her own.

‘Matheson!’ The summons made Charlie jump, kicking her stress-doll and the old metal-foil lucky duck onto the floor. She cursed and grabbed it, slicing synth-skin on the sharp edges. It got put back into place before Charlie scrambled up and loped - hips aching with sullen resentment of an hour sitting still- over to Clayton.

‘Sir?’

Clayton smiled at her, tight-lipped and almost angry. ‘I found you an alternative, Matheson. It’s down in the Bakery….and it’s this or the DNMs. Understood.’

‘It’s this,’ Charlie insisted.

‘Wait until you’ve seen it to decide.’


	3. Chapter 3

The Bakery was scraped out of the bowels of the building, a maze of dead ends and lab equipment. It was dimly lit by distant, flickering bulbs, dials flickering and ticking. The air was dry and dank, with a distant whiff of burning rubber and solder. It had never not been creepy, and now it reminded Charlie of hospital.

She huffed out her nerves on a cloud of breath and followed the scarred, faded lines of yellow that led to the Ovens. Miles groused they were a security hazard, any intruder literally had a bright yellow arrow pointing the way to the Republics most precious resource. He didn’t grouse too hard. Back in the bad old days that Charlie didn’t (want) to remember, when the Republic was a handful of desperate people barricaded in an old building, someone had gotten in and found their way to the Ovens.

They called the nanites ‘hives’, but the things weren’t like bees. More like hornets. When the interlopers had disturbed the Ovens without the proper codes, they’d swarmed out and just taken them apart.

Supposedly all that was left was pink goo. Supposedly Rachel kept a jar of it in her office. Supposedly one of them had been Charlie’s Dad.

There wasn’t a lot that Charlie would put past her mom, but she thought even Rachel would draw the line at keeping her kids’ Dad in a jar. She hoped so anyhow.

Off-key singing echoed off the pocked tunnel walls as Charlie got closer to the Ovens. Something about ‘here’s my number, so call me maybe’. The Baker was in. Charlie ducked through the tacked up plastic sheeting that served for a door - batting it out of the way with one hand.

The lanky scientist was hunched over a table, magnifying lens clipped to his glasses, as he pinched and plucked at a floating bug of light. Interface links were stitched to his knuckles and across the pads of his fingers. Charlie had seen her mom work with them before, each gesture cascading down ever decreasing ranks of nanites. From the tiny to the microscopic.

She coughed politely.

‘Fuck off,’ Baker said, not looking up.

‘That’s nice.’

Recognition jerked Baker’s head up from his work and he squinted at through heavy lenses. A grin creased his face. ‘Charlie! You’re back. Look at you.’

He tugged off the lenses, lines dug into his brow from the elastic, and strode towards his. Arms out. Charlie lifted a hand, warding him off.

‘No,’ she said, backing up a step. ‘No hugs.’

He ignored her, pulling her into an enthusiastic bear hug. Nose squashed against his chest, Charlie tried to wait out the sweaty experience.

‘Not letting go until you hug me back,’ he told her.

‘Urgh,’ Charlie groaned, giving in enough to hook one arm around his back. ‘Good enough?’

He snorted into her hair. ‘Barely,’ he said. ‘You are turning into a piss-poor hugger, short-stuff.’

‘I could break your ribs with my fingertips.’

‘And yet your hug is like being slapped with a wet noodle.’

He let go finally and stepped back, giving her hair a ruffle. Charlie smoothed it back down and looked at him accusingly.

‘I thought we’d agreed, no hugging when I’m in uniform.’

It lacked bite - even Charlie could tell that. Baker had come to see her at the hospital too. Just twice. Considering it was the first time he’d left the Bakery in 10 years, it impressed Charlie more than Jason’s relationship death watch. With Miles gone and mom off being mom, he was family. The closest that Charlie had, anyhow. It got him a hug. One hug.

‘You looked like you needed one,’ Baker said genially. ‘What brings you down here, Charlie?’

‘Good question,’ Charlie muttered. A layer of synthskin hung on the wall, dripping with nutrient sweat and twitching with wires. She couldn’t decide whether it was worse looking at it, or having it at her back and knowing it was there. ‘Clayton sent me down to pick up my new partner.’

Bakers eyebrows went up and his mouth pursed. ‘You?’

She copied his expression. ‘Me? Me what.’

‘To be honest,’ Baker said. ‘I did not think recommissioning was why she had me drag that out of storage. Why would she-’

‘Mom’s new rule is that every cop has to have a DNM series parner.’

‘Makes sense. They’re reliable, durable, hive-minded so the chain of evidence is incontestable and...’ He trailed off, his mind finally catching up with his brain. ‘And they’re modeled on your brother. I forget sometimes. I guess you don’t.’

No. She didn’t. Baker rambled on about engrams and blueprints and how it wasn’t really Danny as he led her out of his workroom and into the Ovens. Even Charlie - the First Daughter of the Republic as the papers had tried to brand her - had only been here a couple of times. It always surprised her how ridiculously unimpressive it was. Four glass tanks full of dull metal sand. That was it. No wires, no ominous hum. Just sand in a tank, like the world’s worst ant farm.

Billions of nanites. More actually, but Charlie’s brain always hurt when she tried to simultaneously comprehend the scale of their content and its crawl between your gene-code dimensions.

Whistling to himself Baker walked over to the fridge in the back of the room. It wasn’t the sort of fridge you kept your lunch in - although Charlie queasily happened to know Baker did. This fridge was for bodies - or shells, as Rachel called them. Even she didn’t design as something as mind-fucking realistic as the DMN’s without a bit of practice. The first had been metal rigs like spiders, all joints and skittering. They’d built the Wall, gone out to forage.

‘I want to keep people safe,’ Rachel had told Charlie, back when she still talked to her. ‘I don’t want to see any more of our people get hurt.’

Now, Charlie knew hurt meant die. She supposed it even made sense. of what happened after. When Mom couldn’t make people stop getting hurt, she started making people that couldn’t get hurt. The smooth, porcelain-doll automatons that had been her and Danny’s baby sitters, bland and anodyne as a Harlow’s nurture monkeys, the enforcers with patches of human skin to reassure and then…

Baker dragged one of the drawers and slapped his hand on a bare, wet chest. ‘Here we go,’ he said. ‘The last MNR chassis in existence.’

‘Seriously?’ Charlie blurted. She stepped forwards to see better, and yeah...an MNR. Short curls, the ends stiff with ice from the fridge, and the strong, sculpted jaw she remembered from the streets when she was a teenager. She’d never seen one out of uniform before. She always imagined they were like the enforcers - just a few patches of reassuring humanity - but Rachel had made him look whole, human. ‘I thought they were all decommissioned.’

‘Most were.’ Baker slid his arms under the chassis and lifted it, grunting at the slack weight of skin and reinforced metal bone. ‘There’s something in their programming that goes soft after an unspecified series of cycles. Not a problem when they were getting blown up out over the Wall, but once the war was over… This one, though, he was cold-storaged inside.’

‘Why?’

Baker shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Sentiment.’ He dropped the shell on the table, tanned, scars limbs sprawling awkwardly. Charlie shifted uncomfortably, trying to remind herself it was just a bot. Just because it looked human, vulnerable and naked except for white, code-printed shorts, didn’t mean it was.

‘And this is my new partner?’ she asked. ‘A crazy kill-bot?’

‘Looks like it,’ Baker said. He rolled his sleeve up, exposing a pale, scarred forearm. It looked like something had chewed on it, taking bits. Someone had. Before the Wall, it had been a dangerous world. Baker shoved his arm into one of the tanks and brought it out gloved in metal. ‘There you are,’ he crooned.

Charlie shuddered. ‘That always creeps me out,’ she muttered.

‘Don’t be a muggle, Charlie,’ Baker snorted. ‘Your mom made these pretties.’

‘Do not care.’

The sand, of course, wasn’t nanites. Or it was, but they were just the hive’s workers. They nurtured and built the power-cell drones. Rachel, of course, was the Queen. On this occasion, though, Baker was repurposing them. He put his hand on the MNR’s face and the sand dripped off his skin and seeped into the bot thought it’s nose, mouth and under its eyelids. You could see them moving under the thin flap of synth-flesh.

‘Anyhow, don’t worry about Monroe here,’ Baker said absently, a gesture calling up a holographic dissection of the bot’s brain in mid-air. He tapped and tweaked, zooming in to trace synaptic pathways and then out again for an overview. ‘His last scan showed no degradation of his identity controls. He’s as safe as a kitten, well, a highly trained kitten with a gun that could squish your head in its fingers… He’ll do as he’s told. Mostly.’

Charlie frowned at him. ‘Mostly?’

On the table the bot opened its eyes, grey sand pouring out like tears to reveal eyes nearly the same colour. It looked around and sat up, swinging its legs of the table and jumping to its feet. Charlie stepped back, one hand going to her gun.

‘What the fuck is going on?’ the MNR demanded, voice low and rough like it still had sand in its throat. ‘Why am I down here? Where’s-’

Baker snapped his fingers under its nose and next to its ears, making it twitch and glare at him.

‘You’ve been recommissioned,’ Baker said. His voice sounded odd, tense. Maybe he wasn’t as sure of this bot’s stability as he claimed. Charlie moved to put herself between it and the tanks. Not there was much she could really do. Baker slapped the bot’s shoulder. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll find all the relevant data in the cloud when you review. For now, meet your new partner. Charlie Matheson.’

The bot turned and stared at her, something in the pale eyes that she’d never seen in the DRM’s. Interest.

‘Charlotte,’ he said. The extrapolation from nickname to name made her frown. ‘I’m pleased to meet you at last.’

‘It seems almost...alive,’ Charlie said, glancing at Baker.

‘Yes,’ Baker said. ‘That’s why they were so unpredictable. Your mother was working with Sanborn. Rather than basing their programming on predicate calculus, he tried to make them...human. He thought they were more effective fighters if they reacted, well, emotionally instead of with logic. It gave them something of a...personality.’

‘Sounds like a bad idea,’ Charlie said. She walked around the bot, examining it curiously. ‘So this bot-’

‘Is standing right here,’ it said, interrupting her. ‘And once you’ve finished looking at my ass, call me Monroe.’

‘I’ll call you what I like, bot,’ Charlie snapped, stopping in front of it. ‘Can we turn this...personality...off.’

‘Nope,’ Baker said.

‘You sound like your mother, Charlotte,’ the bot said.


	4. Chapter 4

It _fidgeted_. Fingers tested the cuffs of his uniform and ran along the seals of the car door. The DNM’s didn’t fidget. They didn’t have a preference for what uniform they wore either, but the MNR had refused to wear the battlesuit on the grounds he looked like a bug.

If it wasn’t for the dim pulse of circuitry under its skin as it updated its files, Charlie might have thought it was human.

‘Where are we going?’ it asked, turning its head to look out at the city passing by. How long had it been under, Charlie wondered. It had only been a year for her, and sometimes if felt like an alien city.

‘I’m going,’ Charlie said. ‘You’re just along for the ride. Just stay in the car and stay out of my way.’

It glanced at her. ‘I’m your partner.’

‘You’re equipment.’

In the light, it’s eyes weren’t grey. They were a clear, surprisingly pretty blue. What was the point of giving a soldier-bot pretty eyes?

‘Are you a bigot, Charlotte?’ it asked. ‘When you’re what, 25% synthetic according to your medical files?’

Charlie’s hands slipped on the wheels, the car swinging to the side before she brought it under control. She breathed out through her nose, just like the psych’s recommended. ‘What the fuck are you doing in my personnel files?’

‘I like to read in the car,’ it said. ‘What happened at Delphi, Charlotte?’

That was the question wasn’t it. Except Charlie didn’t think talking it over with a blender with delusions of personhood was going to help fill in the blanks between fire and pain and the screaming. The only solid memory she had was Miles’ face, his hand on her cheek. ‘I’ll be back, Charlie. I promise.’ Except that had been a lie.

‘You call me Lieutenant, or Matheson. That file is sealed.’

‘It was sealed. I opened it. I was curious.’

‘You’re a machine, you don’t get curious.’

‘Bigot.’

‘Shut up.’

‘Make me.’

Charlie stopped herself mid-retort. Arguing with a blender probably wasn’t a sign of mental health either, and she had enough problems.

‘I don’t need a partner, MNR-’

‘Monroe.’

What could it hurt, Charlie supposed. It took less time to say it. ‘Monroe.’

‘Not so hard.’

She changed lanes, avoiding a divot in the road. Habit dialed in the report, fingers skipping over the inset keyboard on the door. By tomorrow it would be fixed, tarmac patched. Half the roads in the Republic were already replaced with the construct-polycrete, durable and perfect - then they’d run out of resources. Now it was an ‘at need’ situation.

‘I don’t need a partner, I don’t need a robot nanny-’ (another one) ‘-and I don’t need a friend. So just stay out of my way and we’ll rub along fine. You get to be out of cold storage; I get to do my job.’

‘My job too,’ Monroe said. It fingered the badge on its collar thoughtfully. ‘I’m a cop now.’

‘You’re equipment,’ Charlie reiterated.

‘And you’re going to use me?’ Monroe asked, looking at her.

The quick flush of heat that hit her stomach, spreading out through her skin, caught Charlie by surprise. Since the accident, everything had pretty much been in shut-down. Understandable, the pyschs had told her: drugs, trauma, the fact that she didn’t feel it was her body anymore. Apparently her sex-drive picked today - at a really bad time - to reboot itself.

Great. She couldn’t even tell Monroe to fuck off. It wasn’t like it meant to insinuate anything, did it? That was all Charlie. Well, it wasn’t the first time she’d gotten horny at the wrong time, or place. In fact, a robot wasn’t even the most inappropriate thing to make her hot. Just ignore and move on, you got used to it.

‘Shut up.’

Monroe gave her a curious look, eyebrows raising over those pretty blue eyes in question. Maybe she was a little out of practice. A little.

‘Nuisance call on Cecil B,’ she said. ‘A peeper.’

Monroe cocked its head, circuits running blue under its skin. ‘I thought you were a homicide detective.’

‘I am,’ Charlie said, taking the last turn. ‘No homicides right now.’

‘Not counting cold cases and cases currently under appeal,’ Monroe said. ‘There are 102 open homicides in the Republic on the militia books as of this morning.’

Yes, that sounded about right. Charlie bit the inside of her cheek and tried to make herself smile like the good, well-adjusted little cop she was...pretending to be. ‘Well, I  guess the Republic cares as much about its living citizens as its dead ones. Hallelujah, it’s a brave new day.’

‘No particularly for me,’ Monroe pointed out. ‘Since I’m not living, dead or a citizen.’

The put upon tone was programmed in, result of a series of IFTT relays and response parameters. It still turned Charlie’s dutiful grimace into a smirk. ‘Sucks to be you, huh?’

‘I’ve still got frost in my crack,’ Monroe pointed out. ‘Anything happens to you, I get sent back so Baker can shove an icicle up there. Yeah, kinda does.’

She didn’t laugh. It had been a really long time since she laughed. Still, it was close. The scratchy feeling in her throat lasted until she turned onto Cecil B.

It was one of the reconstructed streets. Polycrete roads and buildings fronted with hive-embedded softcrete. It made the streets quiet, no echoes, and safe. Not many criminals wanted to break the law on a street where every window hid a million curtain-twitchers.

Charlie parked the car in the emergency space, a flicker of light beeping through the cab as her security clearance was checked, and got out. It was a face-time case, just turn up, look like the Republic cared and then get back to doing something useful. She’d pulled dozens when she was a rookie. It was hardly walking into the bloody remnants of a home invasion, or questioning a traumatised little girl who was the only survivor of a family that thought it was safe beyond the wall.

So why were her hands sweating? She rubbed them on her thighs, the uniform mesh wicking the sweat away fastidiously. Her throat felt tight, squeezed like a hand was around it.

‘Charlotte?’ Monroe leaned on top of the car, chin resting on its forearm. ‘Your heart rate is elevated. Unless you’re still aroused from our conversation in the car, I assume something is wrong?’

‘I...what...I was not,’ Charlie spluttered. ‘And how’s my heart rate any of your business? Stop...scanning me...or whatever you were doing.’

‘I can hear your heart, Charlotte,’ Monroe pointed out, slamming the car door. ‘Not to mention perceive the heat signature of your skin and see the dilation of your eyes and-’

‘Fine,’ Charlie snapped, holding her hands up. He could probably tell where she’d eaten breakfast from them. ‘Just...keep it to yourself. In fact, just shut up until I’ve finished with the witness. And it’s Lieutenant.’

‘You’ve said.’

The address led them to tall, thin house, with a silver town car outside and windows privacy-stained black. When Charlie hit the intercom, the voice that inquired her business had the faintly flat timbre of an AI. The pronunciation was nearly right, but every now and again just over or under emphasised.

‘Lieutenant Matheson,’ she said. ‘I’m here to speak to Duncan Ballantire?’

The door was yanked open by a red-faced man, already mid-rant. He was blond, hair cropped short around his ears, and had watery blue eyes that bulged behind colourless lashes. ‘About time! We could have been murdered in our bed! Gutted!’

Charlie blinked away the vision of punching the ass in the mouth. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Ballantire. The report didn’t mention he was armed.’

‘Yes, well, he could have been. For all we know.’

‘Or that he got into the house.’

‘If we hadn’t seen him-’

Charlie nodded. ‘So he didn’t get in the house, and he wasn’t armed?’

‘Not this time, but-’

‘Great then,’ Charlie said. There was no missing the sarcasm in her voice, but it ws better than punching the ass in the face. ‘Glad we cleared that up. Now we can talk to your wife, who was the one giving some sicko his jollies. Not you.’

The man glared at her, nostrils flaring as he breathed furiously. ‘Give your badge number to my Hive, I’ll be speaking to your superior office about this.’

He turned his back and stalked down the hall. Charlie supposed they were to follow. Monroe leaned in over her shoulder.

‘I can see why you wanted me to be quiet,’ it said. ‘That was a thing of beauty, got him eating out of your hand.’

She jabbed her elbow back, forgetting it was metal and plastic behind her, not flesh. It felt like elbowing flesh, Monroe whoofed accommodatingly and backed off a step. It was well-programmed. Stepping over the threshold, Charlie headed towards the sounds or arguing.

Duncan Ballantire was a dark-haired woman with sharp eyes and mid-range expensive fitted suit. She didn’t seem half as rattled by the peeper as her husband was. Although from her cool, steady eyes, Charlie would guess that Duncan didn’t get rattled often.

‘It was just some local kid,’ Duncan said, sitting back and crossing her legs. Her linked hands rested on her knees, a simple, beaten silver band on one finger. ‘Not a problem.’

Charlie walked over to the window in question, bending over to look out. Heavy, red blooms pressed against the glass from outside, nasty thorns jabbing out of the twisted stems. Not the easiest place to station yourself and to see what? Charlie turned around and glanced around the room, nice, dark furniture, bookshelves and walls of framed photographs of the Ballantire family.

‘Still,’ she said. ‘It must have been upsetting, to have your privacy intruded on.’

A thin smile creased Duncan’s face, not reaching beyond her cheekbones. ‘My windows are cameras,’ she said. ‘Privacy is an illusion. That’s what I based my business on.’

‘Ballantire Securities,’ Monroe provided, voice low and pleasant. ‘They know you better than your mirror, according to their marketing.’

Duncan wasted a smile on the robot. ‘You know my work.’

‘The city does,’ Monroe said. ‘Ballantire Securities has been fined 24 times for interfering with Republic security measures.’

Slowly, the smile crawled up Duncan’s face to crease the corners of her eyes. ‘But never censured. We’re naughty, not bad.’

‘Good to know where to draw the line.’

Ew, in Charlie’s opinion, but apparently the husband didn’t object to his partner making eyes at a robot in front of him. It wasn’t like it was actual cheating, Charlie supposed. Monroe wasn’t a real boy. Still, ew.

‘And your intruder,’ she interrupted. ‘Is it possible this is something to do with your business interests?’

Duncan glanced at her and away, dismissing her. ‘I doubt it,’ she told Monroe. ‘I have enemies, but they’re grown ups as well. They’d shoot at me, not wank into my azaleas.’

‘Roses,’ Charlie said. ‘What did he look like?’

Duncan shrugged and looked away. ‘I don’t know, I only got a glimpse. Young, blond-’

‘No,’ her husband interrupted. Duncan’s mouth pinched, just thread of tension pulling taut along the seam of her lips. It was nearly imperceptible, but Charlie had grown up with Rachel Matheson. Whole conversations could be had via micro-expressions in their house. ‘He had a grey hoodie pulled up -’ he mimed tugging a hood down to the bridge of his nose. ‘-and he had a beard, or stubble. Duncan, you had to see?’

She shrugged, mouth pursing in time with the twitch of her shoulders. ‘You saw him first, Jim. By the time I turned, he was already running. It was all a little distressing.’

Charlie nodded and stepped away from the window. ‘If I could have a look in the garden?’

Ballentire snorted. ‘Is that what we pay taxes for?’ he asked. ‘Nanotech crawling out of our mirrors and what do we get, a girl who wants to smell the roses. Duncan, you should have let me call the Mayor. We could have made sure we were treated seriously.’

‘Oh, they seem quite capable,’ Duncan said, smiling at Monroe. ‘They seem ready and able to deal with anything.’

She stood up, straightening her jacket so it hunt street. ‘If you’ll excuse me. I need to get back to work. Contracts don’t take the day off. Jim, see the officers get what they need.’

Her heels dug divots into the thick carpet as she stalked out, not bothering to even glance at Jim for a nod of agreement. He scowled harder, but showed them to the garden, hovering to watch them work suspiciously.

Let him. Charlie squirmed into the position the peeper would have had to be in to see through the window, pushing thorns out of her face with her arm. Two knee dents in the dirt. Charlie passed her hand over one, biting her tongue at the alien information from her palm sensors splashing into her as brain lines and possibilities.

Cotton and manure (90% cow, 10% lion and sold in bags by the shabby little zoo Mom had preserved because they liked it) and evaporating heat. Nothing usuable.

‘I noticed something during my search of the recorder earlier,’ Monroe noted. It leant against the wall, watching her. There was something like pity in its cold, blue gaze, although why anyone would bother giving a military bot compassion was beyond Charlie. Compassion and pretty blue eyes didn’t seem likely to make it better at killing.

‘What? she asked absently, shuffling out backwards. There were better places to hide and peep. Charlie glanced around, sealing the scene to her arm’s NMC. (‘A thousand uses!’ the ad crowed, like anyone was going to rip their arm off just so they could do on-site fibre analysis.)

‘Your uncle’s death is marked down as one of the unsolved homicides in the city.’

Charilie dusted her hands off. That was not a homicide,’ she said flatly. ‘My uncle is not dead.’

Not until Charlie caught up with him anyhow.


	5. Chapter 5

 

20 dees for a bowl of soup from a stall. The shortages were getting worse. Nanites could make feasts, but not food. Charlie tossed her stick to the bored looking teen for payment - she could pay through her arm, but sticking her finger into the reader just felt like a party trick, and she wasn’t ready for that - and took the thin plastic bowl. Leaning her hip against the stall, she cradled the hot bowl in her hand - excreted-cellulose dimpling under fingers - and frowned at Monroe. It was perched one-hipped on a stool, long legs braced.

‘You’re just going to sit there?’

It shrugged. ‘I don’t eat.’

‘You could wait in the car. With the radio.’

‘Partners eat together; it’s a bonding experience. We learn about each other.’

‘You aren’t eating.’

‘I can watch you,’ it said. ‘It’s close enough.’

Charlie rolled her eyes and took a drink of soup. It was hotter than she’d thought. Her hand registered the heat - 190 degrees - but it didn’t feel it. Not until it hit the inside of her mouth anyhow. She spat it back out and grabbed a napkin, wiping her tongue.

‘See, I’ve just learned you’re disgusting,’ Monroe said, wrinkling its nose in disgust. ‘I feel more connected to you already.’

Charlie gave it the finger and balled the napkin up, tossing it at the trash. ‘What did you think of the Ballentires?’

It raised its eyebrows at her. ‘Do robots think, Charlotte?’

A fat man in a patched poncho, a makeshift prosthetic eye bulging in the socket, shoved by her to the stall. Charlie stepped back, getting out of the way, and headed towards the car. Monroe dropped into pace behind her, elbow not quite touching with every step.

‘Take it as short-hand for report your analysis - based on physiological and psychological obserservation - of the situation,’ she said. ‘Ballentires.’

The lightshow flickered under its skin, picking out faint scars and freckles in the dermis and the lines around its eyes. It scratched its jaw absently. ‘According to the logs in the police Hive, it was the husband who called in the intruder - are you still drinking that?’

Charlie stopped mid-slurp, soup stinging against her scalded tongue, and raised her eyebrows at it.

‘The soup, you spat in it.’

She swallowed and wiped the back of her hand over her mouth. ‘My spit.’

‘That’s disgusting.’

Charlie swallowed. ‘When you have to eat, you get to judge.’

‘I think you’ll find I’m judging now,’ it said, narrowing pale eyes at her.

‘Ballentires,’ Charlie prompted, letting herself into the car. For a second she debated leaving it behind, just driving off. Except it would probably find her. The Republic wasn’t big enough to hide in - not from the Hive. Charlie had tried before. ‘She didn’t want us there at all.’

It climbed in the other side and slouched, kicking a booted foot up on the dash. ‘Embarrassed? Security experts aren’t exactly fans of people slipping past their security. Least, they weren’t in my day.’

Charlie huhed, pausing with her finger on the ignition. She sat back and huhed again, closing her eyes and trying to remember the scene.

‘I can display the crime scene if you need it,’ Monroe said.

‘Do it,’ Charlie said, although she kept her eyes closed. Computers noticed everything, humans were hard-wired to see what was out of place. ‘No guards.’

‘None,’ it agreed. There was a pause and then, sounding faintly aggrieved, the voice noted. ‘Apparently that is Republic policy on private armed forces - although I didn’t know that before Rachel let her pet tech grope around in my brain. So thanks for that little upgrade.’

Charlie opened her eyes, rubbing the itch out of them and glanced at Monroe. Its hand was balanced on its knee, tiny spikes piercing the palm and projecting a perfect, desaturated line copy of the house in mid-air. She gestured, making it spin.

‘If you’re a cop, you need to be authorised by our Hive,’ she said absently. ‘Did you download the history from the Ballentire Hive?’

‘Of course.’ The blink was too slow, light crawling behind the thin veil of pale lids. ‘Nothing useful. The intruder arrived just before the Hive’s standard purge of the previous 24 hours.’

‘Damn. Lucky shit,’ Charlie tilted the house, studying the layout. ‘What about the footage before we got there? Anything interesting?’

A pause and then Monroe frowned. ‘Apparently, we arrived just after the Hive’s standard 24 purge.’

Charlie snorted and started the car. ‘See? I told Clayton having a partner would slow me down. Made me take the long way around.’

One good thing about having a bot doing a ridealong though. It made the report while Charlie drove.

The Ballentires were still there when they got back. One Ballentire anyhow. Mr Ballentire lay in the hall, a crust of blood drying into the carpet, throat opened in a bloody x-kiss like he was getting ready for autopsy. Charlie crouched and touched his cheek with the back of her fingers, sensors registering the body temperature. Still warm.

‘Call it in,’ she ordered. ‘I’ll go after for Ballentire.’

She scrambled to her feet, the ache along healed cracks suddenly terrifying, and pulled her gun from under her jacket. The weight of it was right, her fingers registering the right amount of pressure. She’d passed her re-certification with flying colours. This was the first time in the field since…

Her mouth was dry and her brain felt like it was shaking. Everything felt like it was shaking - but she’d calibrated the arm so it didn’t transmit the tremor. She stepped over the body and loped out of the room, calling up the memory of Monroe’s map in her head as she checked through the rooms.

The study they’d seen earlier was a mess, desk drawers tipped out on the floor and books toppled off the shelves. From the blood on the floor, this was where Ballentire had been dropped. Charlie let the door swing shut and turned to the kitchen. Something creaked overhead, making Charlie look up.

Upstairs.

It had been downstairs in Delphia - downhill anyhow, her legs burning as she tried to save the wrong person. Stupid, stupid girl. Stupid little girl.

(It had been years since Miles’ had called her that, but since she woke up… The phrase had been stuck on repeat in her head. Old contempt, pitch perfect. Right down to the taste of tears and snot in the back of her throat. God, it was pathetic. God, she could never tell her psych.)

Charlie swallowed the taste and headed up the stairs, sticking close to the bannister to minimise the chance of creaking. It wasn’t the Delphi. It couldn’t be worse, that was something.

The hair on the back of her neck itched on end and she jerked around, gun lifting. Monroe caught it, wrapping his fingers around the muzzle and pushing it back. He looked...nothing. No judgement, no ‘what the fuck’. Just moving the gun out of his face, which was fair enough.

He gestured with one hand - the signs surprisingly easy to interpret. Same as the ones Miles used. It made sense, she supposed. Miles had fought in the war, he’d have fought with the MNR series. He’d put himself on point. Charlie corrected that with a twirled finger - no more taking orders. Not from anyone - definitely not from a bot.

The hall upstairs was neat. There were photos on the wall - Duncan and her husband smiling like foxes at awards ceremonies. Charlie took the last step and looked towards the open bedroom door. Clothes were strewn over the floor, a slice of mirror just visible through the crack.

In the mirror - behind Charlie - a door swung open. Charlie spun around and blocked, catching the knife on her reinforced gauntlet. The knife cut into it, gouging down into the monolinks and dragging at Charlie’s arm. Good knife then, an expensive bit of hardware. Duncan swore - flat words out of perfectly glossy lips - and used the jammed knife as a lever to throw Charlie into Monroe. It caught her - taking a step back to absorb the impact - and Duncan spun around to kick Charlie in the chest.

Monroe twisted around her, arm wrapped around her head, as they bounced down the steps. They hit the floor in the hall with a crack - the wooden floor, not Monroe’s reinforced skeleton.

‘Shit,’ Charlie gasped breathlessly. She rolled off Monroe and scrambled to her feet. Duncan was gone from the top of the stairs. Without thinking, she offered it a hand. It didn’t need it - she realised that too late to retract the gesture. It rolled gracefully to its feet. ‘Go after her,’ Charlie told it, taking her hand back. ‘I’ll cut her off.’

‘That isn’t-’

Charlie ignored it and headed outside, cutting around the side of the house. Her feet scuffed through the neatly raked gravel. There had been a garage in Monroe’s render. Just under the bedroom.

She skidded around the corner just as Monroe tackled Duncan out of the window. The knife was rammed hip-deep into its back, Duncan’s hand locked around it as she twisted and wrenched at it. Dark red circuitry pulsed under its skin as it snapped Duncan’s wrist and stood up, picking her up by the throat. It looked...angry, and then it threw her off the roof.

In mid-air Duncan’s body went from broken, floppy doll to acrobat, flipping around to land on her feet. All that was left of the polished businesswoman was the lipstick. Her hair was dragged back into a rough ponytail and the skinsuit she wore moved with her, polyfibre clenching like muscles around her calves and bracing her knees.

That was… Charlie hadn’t seen anything like that before, not even back when she went to her mom’s labs. She aimed the gun.

‘Hands behind your head,’ she snapped. ‘You’re under arrest in the name of the Republic.’

A smirk slanted over Duncan’s mouth, tight at the edges as she cradled her wrist. ‘For what crime, ma’am. Not that the Republic really needs an excuse, does it?’

‘Murdering your husband sound good enough? Get down.’

Duncan gave a ‘you got me’ tilt of her head. ‘Yeah, that was an impulse. Always a mistake. Still, if you and that fucking monster hadn’t come back… I’d be in the wind.’

‘Tragic kidnapping victim,’ Charlie guessed. ‘On the ground, now. Or I’ll shoot you where you stand.’

‘You don’t seem the type.’

Monroe dropped to the ground behind her. It stabbed her knife into the wall, blade grinding into the mortar. ‘I do though. Don’t I?’

Wariness took the edge of Duncan’s smirk as she shifted to the side, keeping both of them in view.

‘You know what that thing is?’ she asked. ‘And you call me a killer?’

‘It’s a bot, the killer holds the leash.’

Duncan snorted. ‘That thing? That thing was a killer before they wrapped it in plastic.’

‘Yeah, I’m sure it gave someone a real dirty look from the Hive,’ Charlie said. ‘Get down Mrs Ballentire.’

There was a pause and then Ballentire went down on her knees, folding her arms gingerly behind her back. She was still smiling. ‘If it weren’t for you meddling kids...’

Charlie frowned at her.

‘Great,’ Ballentire sighed. ‘Under arrest and now I feel old. What age were you when the lights went out, kiddo? Do you even remember what it was like before the Republic’s smothering embrace?’

‘Oh great,’ Charlie muttered. ‘Politics.’


	6. Chapter 6

After the Blackout, people died for want of clean water: either from disease or having what other people wanted. It was better now. The hives recycled 100% of the Republic’s water, collected rainwater and reclaimed water from the ground. It was best not to think too much about the process, but it had brought showers back.

Charlie could have made do with the old flannel and a scrub today. She ducked her head under the hot stream of water, squeezing the suds out of her hair with one hand. Tried to ignore the eyes on her, and the muttering back in the locker-room. No one had seen her naked - and she might as well have been in just regulation beige pants and bra - except medical personnel in two years.

Her doctors had said the scars would fade. There were surgical options to consider. Later. They’d been too busy trying to save her life at the time to worry about making it pretty.

They weren’t that bad, even. She’d seen worse. Baker’s arms were a mess. Her mom’s stomach was zippered with scar-tissue from the baby they never talked about. Miles had starbursts of scars on hip, chest and shoulders. It never mattered to Charlie, so why should these be any different?

Except they were.

Fuck letting anyone else know that though. She flicked the shower off and strode over to her locker, scrubbing herself dry from toes to head. The arm lay on the bench, blandly white and eerie. Someone made a disturbed noise, quickly hushed, as Charlie picked it up and slotted it on.

‘Charlie...’

She let herself close her eyes, lips twisting. Like Miles always said. Life sucked.

‘Jason,’ she said, turning around. ‘What is it?’

He rubbed his hand over short-cropped hair, eyes flicking down over the scars he could see and then away again. His new girlfriend probably had perfect skin, perfect bones, all her limbs. He settled on her chin as the best place to focus.

‘Clayton sent me,’ he said. ‘Ballentire’s been processed. She wants you to sit in on the interrogation.’

‘OK.’

Charlie yanked her t-shirt on, tugging her hair out of the collar, and grabbed her trousers. She had them half on when she realised Jason was still staring at her. ‘Was there something else?’ she asked, tugging her belt tight.

They stared at each other for a second. Two years ago they’d been in love; he’d bought a ring that he’d never gotten around to giving to her. Now…

‘I’m moving in with Mia,’ he said. ‘I thought you should know.’

Charlie shrugged, holstering her gun. ’It’s none of my business.’

She shoved past him and walked out of the locker room, ignoring the titter of gossip breaking out behind her. Once she was out of sight she faltered, leaning against the wall.  It felt… It felt too much, Charlie still wasn’t able to deal with it. she took a ragged breath and wiped her face on her sleeve. After a second, she pushed herself upright.

Ballentire, that she could deal with.

 

The make-up had been scrubbed off, the suit replaced with dingy grey prison overalls and her nails stripped and clipped. Duncan Ballentire still looked like she thought she was in charge, her hands linked together on her knee and smiling like she still had something up her sleeve.

‘Smug cow isn’t she?’ Clayton said, standing with her arms crossed in front of the Hive-ob.  ‘Why’s that then?’

Charlie leant on the desk, crossing her feet at the ankle. ‘Maybe she’s got friends.’

That made Monroe snort. He scowled through the obs at Ballentire. ‘With her personality?’

Apparently either getting stabbed in the back or being called a thing had tweaked Charlie’s bot. It was holding a grudge.

‘Did anything show up during processing?’ Charlie asked.

Clayton shook her head. ‘Nothing.’

‘Incorrect,’ Monroe said.

Tension flexed along the line of Clayton’s jaw, twitching in the tight line of her cheeks. It was gone in a second, fast enough that Charlie almost doubted she’d seen it. ‘Explain,’ she ordered.

Monroe looked at Charlie. So did Clayton.

‘Not my fault,’ Charlie said defensively. ‘I was the first thing it saw. It imprinted. Explain, Monroe.’

‘I’m not an it,’ it said.

‘Just explain.’

Monroe waved his hand over the obs, calling up bio-analysis from the Hive. Layers of information, building a blue outline of Ballentine from her genes out. He hooked his finger, pulling the imagine up out of the screen.

‘Remodelling fractures,’ he said, pointing them out one by one. ‘Dermal implants here and here. Repairs.’

V-notches on her upper arms and inner thighs glowed red on the screen. Charlie pushed herself off the desk and moved to stand next to its shoulder.

‘They look….ritualistic.’

‘Plains tribe initiation markings,’ Clayton said. ‘Fucks. Kills.’

Charlie grimaced, although there were a lot more kills than anything else. The V’s ran from shoulder to wrist on both arms.

‘How did she get into the city?’ she asked. ‘Plains-members aren’t allowed citizenship. Not since the Thanksgiving War.’

‘According to their private files, she married Ballentire in Toronto - in the Safe Zone there.’

‘Long way from the Plains.’

‘She’s a spy,’ Clayton said. She clapped Charlie on the shoulder roughly. ‘Congratulations, Charlie. First day on the job, and you’ve proven everyone wrong. Keep it up.’

It was less encouragement, more an order.

‘What did she want though?’ Charlie asked.

‘Not our business. What matters is that she’ll be spending the next forty years in cold storage,’ Clayton said. A wave of her hand blacked out the obs screen. ‘Any information she has, the Hives will pick out. Even if they don’t, whatever she’s got will be obsolete by the time they crack her loose.’

‘Still-’

‘Charlie, you did a good job,’ Clayton said. ‘Accept it. We’ve our own conspiracy to worry about, remember? I’ll arrange for your mother’s people to pick Ballentire up.’

One last reassuring shoulder slap and Clayton walked out, closing the door behind her. A simple, clean solution. Charlie flicked the obs screen on again, studying the woman on the other side. When was the last time anything had been clean and simple?

‘You don’t believe the Captain?’ Monroe noted. It turned his head to look at Charlie, too close. The slow tilt of its mouth...suddenly it didn’t feel so much like an it. She stepped back, putting space between them. ‘You don’t trust the Captain.’

‘I don’t trust anyone,’ Charlie said softly.

A finger brushed her face as Monroe tucked her hair back behind her ear. ‘You can trust me. I’m programmed that way.’

Charlie pushed its hand away. ‘I don’t need to trust anyone. I need to talk to her.’

 

The room stank. It didn’t matter how often it was cleaned. It smelled of bleach and sweat. Charlie dragged a chair out from the wall, putting in front of her. She sat down, their knees nearly touching.

‘Why were you in the Republic, Ballentire.’

That wiped the smile away in a moue of distaste. ‘Call me Page. With my dear husband gone, I think I’ll go back to my maiden name.’

‘Why were you in the Republic, Page?’ Charlie asked.

‘You know, fifteen years ago? This was the heart of Philadelphia,’ Page said, sitting back and looking around like she could see through the walls. ‘The City of Brotherly Love. I visited once. I visited a lot of places, have you ever even been out of the Walls?’

‘Does that have anything to do with why you’re here?’

Amusement slid coldly through Page’s eyes. ‘No, I suppose not,’ she said. ‘But you know why I’m here. I’m a spy, after your nasty little secrets. You were just too good for me.’

She shrugged helplessly and spread her hands - wincing as the motion made the energy-cuffs spark and singe her skin.

‘I’m just a poor savage,’ she said. ‘Outmatched by your tech-smarts.’

Charlie leaned forwards, her hands braced on her knees. ‘You tricked the hive at your house into wiping itself constantly. You know tech, or you’re smart enough to hire someone who does. Did you husband know?’

She laughed, a bark of derision. ‘He knew I’d been Plains, even paid for my surgery, but he thought I was running away from those mean old tribesmen. Didn’t realise they were my boys. Poor sod. He wasn’t a bad man, not even particularly stupid. For a man.’

‘So why kill him?’ Charlie asked.

Another shrug. ‘It seemed expedient.’

‘Why’d you want to set us on the peepers trail?’ Charlie asked. ‘You didn’t want to report it in the first place, mis-described him. If you hadn’t tried to frame him, I’d have assumed he was one of your ‘boys’.’

Page shook her head slowly. ‘I got no friends in this town.’

‘Enemies then.’

Something Charlie couldn’t identify flickered over Page’s face. Fear? No. Annoyance, maybe. She got up and turned her back on Charlie. ‘Got nothing else to say until I see my lawyer,’ Page told the obs wall.

That was fine. She’d told Charlie enough.

‘This isn’t a detective story,’ Charlie said, standing up. ‘You don’t get a call and a lawyer. You just get crated. Goodbye, Page. I won’t be seeing you again.’

Page spun around and took one long step towards Charlie, a grin tightening her lips. ‘Oh, you will. Trust me, girl, this isn’t the last you see of me. When my boys come, well, next time they will make sure you’re dead...’

The door opened and five DNM issue bots walked into the room, all lope and dead faces. With inexorable gentleness they pinned Page to the wall and clapped a hand to her neck, dosing her through their skin. The fight drained out of Page, her whipcord body going limp and sagging quiescently against them.

Charlie backed out of the room before they could look at her, heart hammering against her ribs until she thought she was going to black out.

This wasn’t another conspiracy. It was the same one.


	7. Chapter 7

  
  


Rain sleeted down the greasy walls of Delphi and puddled in foul, grey puddles on the cracked ground. Even the whores had packed up shop for the night, huddling under whatever cover they could find. The only bodies on the street were dull-eyed hiveheads and refugees, huddled under the Republic issued slickers as they waited for a better life.

Charlie could taste the rain as she breathed, water cold on her lips and tongue. The back of her neck itched with nerves. Delphi was a holding cell - the last stop before getting exiled over the Walls. Even with a squad for back-up she didn’t like being down here. Last time they cleared the district, they’d sent in the armoured cars and been scrubbing blood off the streets for a week. It hadn’t stuck.

‘Miles,’ she said, voice sound so stupidly young that for a second she was glad she’d used the private channel. ‘This is a bad idea.’

He glanced back over his shoulder and smirked. ‘My best ideas are bad ideas.’ She rolled her eyes at him and he gave a rough, soundless chuckle. ‘Trust me, Charlie.’

_Ask what this is, a niggling little voice poked at her, ask before it’s too late._

She didn’t though. She trusted him. So down they went, into the broken, flooding underworld of the Republic. The explosion shattered a wall, water and rubble hitting Charlie. She landed hard, ears ringing with impact and then with the panic being broadcast over the sec-link. Something had gone wrong.

Spitting blood into the floodwater (punctured lung, a detached, unfamiliar voice diagnosed, internal bleeding) Charlie scrambled to her feet.

‘Matheson,’ she id’d raggedly. ‘I’m ok. Captain’s...’

_Gone._

_Disconnect. Blackness._

****************************

Charlie woke up with a flinch that was internal, the violence clenched under her skin, and panted the memory of dank Delphi air out of her lungs. Her apartment had cool, clean, electrified air - Hive scrubbed and so pure it was bland. She couldn’t have afforded it anymore than she could have afforded the arm and the physio.

Sometimes she thought her mom and her would have a better relationship in the old world, when they could have but a continent between them. At a distance it looked like they loved each other.

It took ten minutes for her heart rate to go back to something normal and the panic to stop twitching her nerves like puppet strings. Getting better. Her pysch said she should say that every time she noticed an improvement, however small.

Every day, in little ways, you’re getting better and better.

Charlie didn’t like lying to herself though. She dropped her good arm over her eyes and tried to shove her brain back down into sleep. Deep enough not to dream. The anxious shrill of an alert on her com saved her from failing.

‘Matheson,’ she said, or rather croaked through a dry, cottony mouth. Yuck, she’d not realised it had gotten that sticky. She sat up, wiping her hand over her mouth. ‘Matheson. What.’

‘Disturbance at the Tower,’ the disembodied voice of the Hive informed her. ‘Your presence is required.’

It was Danny’s voice. Charlie didn’t think there was enough clean air in the world to make up for that.

****

Monroe had a syn-brew in hand when she got to the Tower, handing it to her without comment as she got out of the car.

‘Thanks,’ she said absently, taking a swig. After six weeks she’d given up trying not to say it - Monroe looked too human and her ‘what do you say?’ reaction was too knee jerk. Besides, Monroe always got her synth right. Hot enough to scald the taste off her tongue, just the way she liked it. They strode across the courtyard, dropping automatically into step. Boots scuffed across the sleek crete tiles, little puffs of nanite activity scouring it clean immediately after. ‘What happened?’

‘Last night, after I returned to my chilly coffin in the Ovens where I’m pretty convinced Baker touches me up while I’m recharging-’

Charlie rolled her eyes and twirled her finger in a speed it up’ gesture. The complaints about Monroe’s living arrangements were getting old. She didn’t know why he cared. Offline and he was out - it wasn’t like he woke up with a stiff neck.

It. Not he. Six weeks hadn’t made him grow a soul.

‘...levels six to nine were affected.’

Charlie took a gulp of hot synth and grunted - just like she’d been listening.

‘You weren’t listening were you?’ Monroe said.

‘Yeah, I was,’ Charlie bristled, then shrugged her admission. ‘Just not in the middle bit. Affected by what?’

‘Gas.’

She stopped and looked at him, raising an eyebrow suspiciously. Technically the MRN-series had a sense of humour, turned out it was a weird one. The things he found amusing tended to skip Charlie’s funny bone.

‘If you faked an alarm to make jokes about me eating chilli again,’ she said. ‘I will let Baker cut your skin off, wrap a DNM in it and make do.’

‘That’s disgusting. Much like the interior of the car after you’ve eaten three bowls of chili you bought from a man with a pot in street,’ Monroe said equably. ‘However, even rat chilli farts-’

‘I didn’t fart and it wasn’t rat.’

‘I don’t fart, I’m a robot, and we don’t have a dog,’ Monroe said, switching topics back smoothly as Jason jogged across the courtyard toward them. ‘Apparently a gas was used to disable the Tower from levels six to nine, rendering everyone on those levels comatose.’

‘Why?’

‘Isn’t finding that out kind of your job?’ Monroe asked. He gave Jason a huge, empty smile. ‘Detective Neville. You look particularly lovely today.’

A scowl tugged at Jason’s face. ‘What’s wrong with that thing?’ he grumbled.

‘He likes you,’ Charlie lied, ignoring the faint snort from next to her. ‘It’s just that social niceties weren’t a top of the line priority for a battle-bot. How did we find out about the breach?’

Still frowning, Jason scruffed his hand over his hand. ‘Shift change. The guards who went down to relieve those on duty managed to hit the alarm before they dropped.’

Charlie blinked in surprise. ‘Gas was still there?’

‘ _Is_ still there,’ Jason said. ‘The filtration systems have been bypassed. Come on. We’ve got footage.’

He turned and strode away - straight shoulders, crisp uniform and a regulation hair cut. The very model of a cop going places.

‘What a dick,’ Monroe said, fake smile disappearing.

‘He’s an officer. You’re a gun with legs. Show respect,’ Charlie said.

‘To you? No. To him? Definitely not,’ Monroe said. 


	8. Chapter 8

Caught in glass, the cops in the Tower replayed their daily routine: paperwork, rounds and tedium. At ten past three they dropped where they stood, or sat, consciousness scythed out from under them. It wasn’t quite instantaneous - in offices and the labs, it was seconds later that the gas knocked the last cops out. The effect was disturbing, like watching dominoes topple on fast forwards.

The DNMs started to put the evacuation protocol into effect - ten bodies moving in disturbing synchronicity as the locked down the cells and moved towards the downed cops. Ten steps - Charlie counted - and they stopped, balanced impossibly on the fulcrum of one foot.

Charlie looked away from the glass, stomach knotting with an old - five year old - pain. It wasn’t how Danny had died - frozen in her memory mid-silent fall - but it was the stillness.

‘What happened to them?’

‘Feedback loop,’ the tech explained grimly. ‘Introduced to the Tower’s security system, it broadcasts a burst of static every 20 nanoseconds. The nanites read it as an error and runs a diagnostic - repeating the process every 20 nanoseconds. Since it is coming from a trusted source, the error logs are being dismissed. It should self-correct eventually.’

‘How eventually is that ‘eventually’?’ Monroe asked.

The tech licked her lips, tongue swabbing dry patches of skin. ‘Twenty years, give or take,’ she said, shrugging resignedly. ‘The Tower is a closed system, so there’s no external balance.’

Jason leaned in over the tech’s shoulder and swiped his finger over the screen, making it flicker and run faster. Not that it was easy to tell. Nothing moved but dust. After a second he lifted his finger, letting the playback resume at normal speed.

Lift doors opened and the relief shift stepped out. The first rows registered the fallen bodies littering the hall and mouthed mute panic. Too late. They went down in rows, falling on top of each other in the confined space. Lift doors swung closed and open on sprawled legs, the bump the only movement in the scene.

‘Can’t send the bots in,’ Jason said, ‘and until the gas clears-’

‘Heavy and inert,’ the tech interrupted. ‘Days to clear unless we can access the internal systems.’

‘-we can’t send bodies in either. Unless they’re...’

‘Suited up,’ Charlie said flatly. Her lips twitched in an empty smile. ‘I wondered why you called me in.’

Jason shrugged, something complicated behind his eyes. ‘That and it’s always good to see you.’

Complicated was more than Charlie could deal with right now. She snorted away the...whatever it was...and focused on what she could deal with: work.

‘You cleared it with Clayton?’ she asked.

‘Suits are here,’ he said.

Charlie’s throat tightened. She had tested for Suit-duty back when she joined the force. She’d been desperate to prove...everything to everyone, and her psych-profile had been - comparatively - rock-solid.

‘What are we waiting for then?’ she said. She supposed she was still desperate to do that, to prove everything to everyone. ‘Let’s do it.’

The Suits were molecularly bonded nanoweave - skin-tight and impervious. If it wasn’t for the fact they were grotesque to wear, people would have them as skin. Few people could stomach wearing them for long; most people went skin-scraping desperate within half an hour.

Miles had told Charlie once that it used to be a gas-mask was all you needed to deal with gas. That was before nano-gas that was absorbed through the skin, that ate through rubber and kevlar. Now, for hazardous duty, you needed suits.

Stripped to her skin Charlie stood in the flimsy silver foil tube, teeth gritted as if that would stop her shivering, as the nanites sprayed threads of silver onto her skin. It burned - jabs of pain sling-shotting along her nerves from fingertips to deep down in her teeth. Sweat broke on her skin, sizzling into steam as the nanites buzzed. Tilting her head back she stared up at the sky - misty grey clouds hanging low over the buildings - and counted down from thirty.

‘I’ve accessed your records,’ Monroe said. ‘Between you and Neville, you’ve suited up three times. He freaked out during his second suiting and disrupted the rescue efforts in Delphi. You spent an extra day buried under rubble, because pretty boy over there wimped out.’

‘Suit psychosis is a recognised issue,’ Charlie gritted out between clenched teeth. ‘He’s to be commended for trying, not condemned for involuntary psychological responses.’

‘Liar.’

She glanced down at him. It. Not him. It was standing next to the foil tube with her arm cocked over her shoulder like a baseball bat. Charlie wasn’t sure if it was humiliating or hysterical.

‘I don’t blame him,’ she said. Monroe looked dubiously. She closed her eyes again. ‘Not mostly. Besides, there’s no-one else.’

No-one they could ask anyhow. Baker was - he’d invented the stuff - but his psych profile was more full of cracks than Charlie’s. And Charlie suspected her mom was - they’d used the suit-tech as therapy for Danny, and Rachel wouldn’t let anything touch him that she didn’t understand. She wouldn’t - couldn’t - ask that though. If Rachel said ‘no’...

‘I’ll go in with him,’ Monroe said.

‘No.’

‘Why not.’

‘Because you’ll hit the hall, fritz out and end up a really awkward paperweight?’

‘I’m war-tech,’ Monore said, stepping closer. ‘I can close myself down to external input, even from the in-house nanites. Charlotte, you’re claustrophobic.’

‘Am not.’

‘That’s what your psych file says.’ it reminded her.

‘Yeah, well, I got over it.’

‘Approximately three times a week you have violent nightmares that disrupt your behavior significantly for hours,’ it told her, voice low and earnest. ‘Physiologically and psychologically.’

Charlie opened her eyes again and glared. ‘How do you know that?’

‘Sweat, body chemistry, behavioural analysis,’ it said calmly. ‘The fact you are an irredeemable jackass in the morning and hit the bar at the end of the day.’

‘You...’ she spluttered. ‘You can’t do that. That’s invasive.’

It shrugged. ‘Basic sensory information. No more invasive than looking at someone’s face for a scowl, for you. Between the tower and the skin-suit...’

‘I’m certified,’ Charlie said. ‘I’ll be fine.’

She had to be. No one would call it suit psychosis if she cracked. They’d just call it broken. A mist of silver hit her face, blinding her with a wash of hot, sickly pain. It made her breath hitch, something in her chest giving a daunted twist. Charlie clenched her jaw until her teeth creaked; dug her fingernails into her palm until it hurt. It wasn’t real pain, just neurological re-configuration confusion. Or NADs - nerve alignment dissonance - if you were Baker. No damage. Just a few minutes of...discomfort.

She just had to ride it out.

Just a bit more…just like down in the dark, under the weight of rocks.

Hands under her arms, the cup of fingers against the curve of her ribs surprisingly, shocking intimate after so long with only doctors poking her, jarred back into breathing. She hadn’t realised that she’d stopped.

‘Charlotte? Your heart-rate is getting dangerously high and the levels of cortisol and adrenaline in your blood have spiked. You might be able to lift a car off a small child, but going down there obviously isn’t a good idea.’

‘You going to report me to Clayton?’ Charlie asked, voice creaking with tension. She pushed herself upright, body aching with the residual conviction of pain. Her joints felt tight, stiff, and her lips and head itched.

Monroe stared at her. She could see her reflection in its eyes - looking less human than it in flexible silver. Her scars stood out in stark lines and clots.

‘I should.’ It picked her arm off from the ground and offered it to her. ‘I won’t.’

She gave a tight nod and slotted her arm back on - the itch crawling down into numb fingers and under fake nails. Her uniform lay in a pile on the ground. She grabbed her jacket and wriggled into it. Technically she didn’t need clothes - the skin would provide all the protection she needed - but walking around like a statue with nipples was just odd.

‘It’s fine,’ she said. More to herself than Monroe. ‘I’ll do this.’

Stamping into her boots Charlie stalked over to where Jason was struggling back to his feet, bracing his hands on his thighs as he caught his breath. The silver limned familiar lines of muscle and bone - making Charlie’s stomach twist with an odd sort of regret. Not for him. Maybe for them. Back when she’d been capable of a them.

‘Ready?’ she asked.

Jason looked up and the feeling of familiarity dissolved. His face was masked in silver, his eyes metal ball-bearings and a flat smear of metal from his nose to his chin. It flexed as he spoke, stretching thin as tissue over his lips.

‘I should ask you that,’ he said.

‘Why?’ Monroe asked from over Charlie’s shoulder. ‘Charlie’s never let anyone down, Neville.’

Even through the skin, Charlie could see Jason’s jaw tighten. ‘Your toaster stays here.’

‘Her toaster goes with her,’ Monroe said flatly, slinging a rifle over its shoulder. ‘She needs someone to watch her back.’

Charlie rolled her eyes and regretted it, feeling the slide of metal cold over her corneas. ‘I can take care of myself,’ she said. ‘We’re the rescue party, not a damsel in distress competition.’

‘I’m coming,’ Monroe said.

There was no time to argue. ‘Fine,’ Charlie said. ‘But if you freeze up, I’m leaving you down there.’

It shrugged. ‘Better than in Baker’s ice-box,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry. I won’t leave you down there.’

Last time someone had said that to Charlie, it had been a lie. She’d believed it and it had been a lie. She didn’t suppose bots could lie though, so maybe it wasn’t stupid that it settled her skin-uneasy stomach a bit.

She wasn’t putting her faith in it, but it was nice to think it was meant.

Maybe.

‘Lets go then,’ she said, slinging her weapons belt tight around her hips. Her skin was crawling, her lungs convinced she was suffocating even if the nanites were oxygenating her blood. Moving helped, a goal helped. She stalked towards the lift down, the techs sliding open the doors open for her to step through. 


	9. Chapter 9

The DM series toppled over stiffly, shoulder clashing with the one next to it and on until it reached a gap. It was like watching a short run of dominoes. Charlie glared at Monroe. ‘Not funny.’

It smirked at her, eyes crinkling at the corners. She was surprised how relieved she was that he hadn’t turned into a lump of metal and plastic. ‘Yeah, it was.’

She shook her head - the pendulum weight of her sheathed ponytail making her inner ear uneasy - and looked away from the bots on the floor. They weren’t Danny, her fingers didn’t need to twitch to help him up and brush him off.

‘Jason, start the evacuation,’ she said. ‘I’ll go and access the main hive, reset the commands so the DMs come back on line.’

He had the good grace to hesitate. It was the glory hogs job, brave cop carried the injured to safety. Vidcasts never wanted to feature the cop who’d turned the computer off. 

‘You sure?’

‘Last thing I want,’ Charlie said bitterly. ‘More attention. Monroe, help him.’

She headed down the hall at a jog, stepping over sprawled legs and dodging between the out-stretched hands of the DMs. Nightmare fuel. Well, she supposed at least it would be a different nightmare.

‘I told you to help Jason,’ she said, pausing at the main desk to grab a sheaf of card-keys from a guard’s belt. Monroe shrugged.

‘I told you, I’m not leaving you,’ it said. ‘Besides, he smells like cheap perfume and his momma.’

Charlie snorted out a laugh - startling herself. She fiddled the card-case open, reading the keys with a swipe of her thumb over the narrow edges. ‘Trust me,’ she said wryly. ‘Julia’s perfume isn’t cheap.’

‘Julia Neville,’ Monroe said, cocking its head to the side. Light flickered under its skin. ‘Wife of Commissioner Neville, a very charitable woman.’

‘Yeah,’ Charlie said dryly, thinking of Julia with her fragrant smiles and calculating eyes. She’d loved Charlie, up until she’d found out Charlie and her mom didn’t get on. Or talk. Or see each other beyond the necessary moments that meant you could still claim to have a family. Still she’d sent flowers every week when Charlie was in the coma - sunflowers, Rachel’s favourite. ‘That’s one word for it. Don’t worry about her though, no matter how much she gives away? She always comes out ahead.’

‘Admirable,’ Monroe said, earnestly and without the usual edge of sarcastic amusement.

Great. Her bot had a thing for Julia Neville’s pencil-skirts. Juuuuust what she needed. Charlie opened her mouth to say something, but the odd notion that it might be because she was … Yeah, she wasn’t going to even think that.  She flicked the hive key out of the sheath, tugging it free of its magnetic moorings. 

‘Fine, but I’ve one stop before we got to the Hive,’ she said.

Monroe raised its eyebrows at her. She didn’t answer the mute question, it would work it out soon enough. Whatever this was about, it wasn’t a prank and it used tech that could interfere with Rachel’s nanotech. The only other person who’d ever done that, well, she’d just been crated a few weeks ago. It was a bit too much of a coincidence.

Charlie flicked another key out the sheath and tagged them both onto her arm, silver nano-skin obligingly holding them in place. She headed down the hall towards the huge, red-painted blast doors that sealed the Crates off from the rest of the world. Last time Charlie had checked, there were 21 people down here. The only prisoners in the Republic. Most criminals were sentenced to community service on the construction crews, or hive-branded and sent over the Wall. Only the people that knew too much and they couldn’t afford to kill got sent down here.

Enemies of the State. 

She flashed her wrist at the sensor on the door, waiting for the flicker of digital acknowledgment. Her stress levels were rising, her body trying to flood with adrenaline as fast as the nano-skin siphoned it off, but this was important. After a second the doors scraped open, moving so reluctantly it was obvious they didn’t get much use. The room on the other side should have been huge and echoing, but it was actually a little smaller thank Charlie’s bedroom.

Crated. Charlie vaguely remember mom talking about doing that to their dog when they moved here, before. She hoped it hadn’t been anything like this. Seamless plexiglass coffins were stacked in the room, a constant flicker of readings glowing on the translucent surface. They looked dusty on the inside, like they hadn’t been cleaned in a while. That was a dense cloud of nanites, tasked with maintaining the prisoners life signs. 

The room stank of antiseptic and disuse, a faint, familiar smell of burnt ozone that Charlie always associated with the Bakery. In their coffins the prisoners were naked and hairless, looking unfinished and vulnerable. 

One of the crates was smashed open, the edges burned and melted. The bottom of it was covered with a thin skin of dust - deactivated nanites. The only thing was, it wasn’t  Duncan’s  crate. She was still laid out in her box. If her ‘boys’ were the ones behind this, they decided the change in leadership was working for them.

‘Shit,’ Charlie muttered.

She crouched down and ran her hand over the side of the crate, trying to find an intact node to access. Nothing flickered to life under her touch. 

‘Monroe,’ she said, looking around. ‘Can you get something out of this?’

‘No,’ he said, not moving from the door. 

‘You didn’t try,’ Charlie said. 

‘I don’t need to,’ Monroe said. ‘I had a list of 21 prisoners, they are all present and accounted for. This is number 22.’

‘What? Who was it?’

‘No one,’ he said. ‘Prisoner identification was blank, no files attached. It just has a catalogue number and the required signatures on it.’

‘That’s...impossible,’ Charlie said. ‘Everyone knows who the crated are, Mom made a point of that.’

Monroe shrugged. ‘Not this one.’

What did that mean? Charlie sat back on her heels and tried to make sense of it. Had it been a spare? Maybe one had malfunctioned and they’d needed to move the prisoner? Except why just leave it here? Why was the hive dead?

‘Can you tell when this happened?’ she asked, tapping her finger on the burned edge of plastic.

Monroe walked into the room and bent over, putting its hand over hers. It...yeah...she tugged her hand free and scooted back, giving it room. It didn’t seem to care. ‘Based on molecular decay and rearrangement,’ he said. ‘One hour.’

When everyone with a reason to be in the Tower had been out for the count. So there had been a secret prisoner 22, and now he or she was gone.

‘Why would my mom want to keep this a secret?’ she asked. 

‘And your uncle,’ Monroe said, straightening up. ‘His signature is on the internment as well.’

Charlie closed her eyes. Her stomach revolted, spitting bile and syn-caf up into her gullet. The skin promptly responded by shoving it back down. The hijacking of her biology made her feel worse, her brain a spinning wheel of pointless, nano-caged panic. 

‘Uncle Miles,’ she said. ‘I suppose it’s good to know him and mom agreed on something, at some point.’

Her voice sounded thin. She  felt  thin, like what she imagined altitude sickness felt like. Charlie closed her eyes for a second, clenching her jaw. There wasn’t time for a panic attack. This wasn’t what  gave  her panic attacks. Monroe was wrong about that, she wasn’t claustrophobic. 

‘Charlotte...’

‘I’m fine.’ She scrambled to her feet - moving easier than she had in..well, years...as the skin automatically pumped analgesics into scar-cramped muscles and aching joints. ‘It wasn’t Duncan, we can deal with prisoner 22 later. Come on, we need to reset the Hive.’

It looked dubious, but when she glared it shrugged and headed for the door. Charlie took a step after him and hesitated. She had to look, didn’t she? Just this once. Turning back to the crates she counted her way along to Prisoner 6 and stared through the mist of nanites at a dark, young face with a scar stitching from his eye to the corner of his mouth.

‘What’s wrong’ Monroe asked.

Charlie swallowed and stepped back. ‘Nothing,’ she lied. ‘Nothing at all. Now do as I told you and get out. We’re done here.’

She dragged him out of the room, sealing the doors behind her. Once she got to the Hive room and reset the corrupted command, the DNM’s came back online and the nanites scrubbed the tainted air clean. Five injured when they fell, two dead. No lasting harm done. Jason got all the attention for his part in the rescue. Charlie stripped off the skin, vomited until she was sure she could taste toenails and went to find somewhere to drink.


	10. Chapter 10

\------------  
The barman splashed a measure of cheap, bathtub brewed gin into a greasy tumbler. It splashed onto the bar, and Charlie was surprised it didn't blister the varnish. She picked up the tumbler and wiped the spill away with her sleeve. It smeared over the polished wood like oil, picking up pinprick rainbows from the overheads.

  
She tossed it back, aiming to hit the back of her throat and bypass as much of her tongue as possible. The bite still made her blink hard, throat spasming as she swallowed, and then the fumes burped the aftertaste over her tongue.

Jesus, and she'd thought morning breath after a year long nap had been bad. She grimaced and rubbed her hand - her hand - over her mouth, pressing her lips against her teeth. There were bars that sold synthahol across the City, nice, clean bars that tarted their drinks up with fruit juice and conversation. Jason used to take her to his favourite. A little glass and plexsteel pop-up with no fixed abode, a subscribed clientele and a menu of fruity craft beers.

  
Charlie snorted at herself. Apparently her subconscious thought she could feel worse than she already did. It was wrong.

A flick of her hand brought the bartender shambling back down with a refill. She slouched down and played with the glass, turning it idly in her fingers.

The bar was - had been - Uncle Miles' haunt,. The drink was his too.

'No pretensions,' he'd said roughly after the first case that had gone bad. 'No expectations. Just piss poor drinks and the chance of a fight later.'  
That wasn't entirely true, of course. They had chicken wings as well. 'Chicken' 'Wings'.

After a while, Charlie had worked out that coming to Delphi - the bar, the booze, all of it - was Miles punishment. For something. For everything. Now it was her’s. The Matheson family legacy. She finally lifted the glass and took a drink. It was probably a bad sign that it was starting to taste alright.

A hand grabbed her shoulder and spun her around, slamming her back into the bar. Old injuries twinged like over-stressed elastic and a gut-full of whiskey sloshed uneasily. Charlie ignored the discomfort, scrawling her Uncle’s smirk over her face. 

‘Problem?’ she asked.

‘I know you,’ the man rasped. His face was held together with scars and cheap prosthetics, bundles of synthetic muscle bulging where it plugged into his jaw and cheek. ‘I’ve seen you. You’re a cop.’

There was a dance of accusation and bravado expected in these situations, an escalation from point a to point picking up your teeth from the floor. Charlie skipped them and just headbutted the man in the face, ducking her chin into her chest. She felt the impact jar through her skullbones and down her neck.

The man staggered backwards, blood drooling out of split lips. He swung his fist in a wild punch at her head. Charlie swayed back out of the way and grabbed the stool, ripping the bolts out of the floor. It felt like she should have felt something - the servomotors straining, the drag at her shoulder - but it felt just like her old arm had. She swung the stool around in a short, vicious arc, the edge of the seat catching the guy in the chin. His jaw clacked shut hard and he pitched over backwards, landing with a thud on the ground.

Charlie dropped the stool and looked around, rolling her shoulders to loosen them up. She could feel the knot of tension at the base of her neck.

‘Anyone else object to me drinking here?’ she asked.

It turned out they did.

* * *

  
Blood and toothpaste splattered the glass sink. Charlie rinsed her mouth with mouthwash again - replacing pennies with wintergreen - and wiped her mouth on her sleeve. She didn't like the taste of blood, it reminded her of the dark.

  
There was no mirror over the sink. None in the apartment, in fact. Rachel had them decommissioned before Charlie had gotten out of hospital. Most days Charlie didn't care.

She was getting used to her new body - she was - but that didn't mean she was interested in seeing it all- the time.

It would have been nice to see what a mess she'd made of herself, though. Her ribs hurt, her knee was clicking at odd intervals and she thought one of her teeth was loose. She poked at it with her tongue to see if it wiggled. It did.

She'd won. More or less, as much as you could win a bar brawl. She'd walked out instead of being thrown. It hadn't helped as much as she'd thought. The impossible thought was still wedged into her brain like a hook, tugging just enough to hurt whenever she forgot to forget about it.

What if. What if...

The doorbell rang. Charlie jumped like she'd been caught doing something wrong, forgetting about her neck until it reminded her. Grabbing her shoulder, digging her nails into the rock hard strip of muscle, Charlie limped out of the bathroom.

She grabbed her gun off the back of the chair. No-one visited her here. Rachel made occasional inspections, but she'd installed the access-system. Her biokey was hard-wired in - so Charlie couldn't revoke it. Not knocking was the point for her.

'Who is it?’ Charlie asked. The taste of blood leaked into her mouth again. She wasn’t sure if it was from her split lip or her mind. Copper was the taste of paranoia. When no one answered she circled around the edge of the room and tagged her thumb on the security panel. 

A square of fluttering light unfurled in front of her, picking out a 3d image of the hall in unsaturated colours and odd pulses. A nanite’s view of the world.  
Clayton. She stood ram-rod straight in front of the camera, mouth a thin line. Charlie’s lost jacket was slung over one shoulder, her finger hooked in the torn collar. Apparently she knew about the brawl. Charlie took her finger off the trigger. Maybe she could just pretend she wasn’t home?

‘You are a city employee, Matheson,’ Clayton said, voice clipped. ‘I can track your biosig like I track the patrol car. I know you are in there. Open. The. Door.’

Or not. Maybe she could leg it out the window instead? 

Charlie opened the door, slouching against the door jamb. From the way Clayton’s eyes widened at the sight of her, her face looked worse than she’d thought. Worry softened the woman’s face - or maybe it was pity - and she started to reach out to her.

‘Charlie-’

There it was. The cloying, managing voice, the one that disappeared out of the room to have muttered conversations about whether Charlie was just damaged, or if she was broken. It went with the smell of flowers and the taste of blood and the pinching knowledge that you weren’t being told shit you needed to know.

Like your uncle had never gone for help. Like they didn’t know where he was. Like under the scaffold of sheet and halo there was a stump instead of an arm. Shit like that. Months of shit like that. Charlie wasn’t going back there. She dragged her bruised mouth into a smirk and crossed her arms.

‘Captain,’ she said. ‘Here to commend me for my stellar performance in the prison today? Just like a real girl, right? Tell the psychs.’

It sounded brittle, even to Charlie, but Clayton got the message. Her hand dropped back to her side and her face went all cop again. She tossed the battered jacket at Charlie, who grabbed it out of the air.

‘What do you think the psychs will say when they find out you’re getting into brawls in the slums?’

Less than they’d say if they knew she was getting into brawls in her Uncle’s old watering hole, Charlie supposed. She kept that to herself, just shrugging. ‘I didn’t start it.’ She turned around and headed for the kitchen, dropping her jacket on the couch as she went. ‘If you’re coming in, close the door behind you.’

She opened the fridge, angling her body to block Clayton’s view. There wasn’t any food in there, unless you counted the bowl of green jello and fruit bits that was Rachel’s good faith effort at home cooking. Charlie would have chucked it already, but it had been here longer than she had. What the hell, it kept the booze and energy drinks company.

Beer. That was a good ‘I’m just hospitable, I don’t have an issue’ drink. Charlie snagged two, glass necks cold against her fingers, and turned around. 

‘Drink?’ she asked, hefting the bottles.

Clayton was giving the apartment a careful once over. Let her. There was nothing of Charlie in the bare bones apartment to give anything away. She looked back at Charlie for a moment and pursed her lips in disapproval.

‘I think coffee would be a better idea.’

Old world. Like Miles. No-one under 30 called the syn-brew coffee, but people who remembered Starbucks still had that mental short cut. Charlie shrugged.   
‘Up to you.’ 

She grabbed the tube out of the sink where she’d left it that morning, shaking the dregs out of it, and slotted it into the machine. While it hissed to itself, she flicked the cap off the beer with her thumb. Leaning her hip against the bar she took a swig. Clayton looked unimpressed. Sitting down on the couch she braced her elbows on her knees, work-scarred fingers laced together.

‘You messaged me that we needed to talk.’

‘It could have waited until tomorrow.’

‘It sounded important,’ Clayton said. She unlaced her fingers and gestured, fingers tracing her mouth and eye. ‘Judging by your face, I was right.’

Reminded of the dull ache, Charlie rolled the cold bottle over her cheek. ‘What’s the sitrep with the Tower?’

There was a pause, then Clayton visibly decided to play along. She got up off the couch and squeezed past Charlie into the kitchen, helping herself to the tube of synth. 

‘Everything is up and running, DNMs rebooted, two casualties,’ she said. ‘Where’s your mugs.’

‘Don’t have any. Just use the tube,’ Charlie said. ‘Who died? Everyone was alive when we went down.’

‘One woman had an allergic reaction to the stimulants they gave her at the hospital,’ Clayton answered. She opened a cupboard and frowned at the boxes of protein bars shoved in there. ‘Sugar? Milk?’

Charlie pointed to the cupboard over the sink. ‘I think there’s some dehydrated creamer left in there.’

‘You live like a transient,’ Clayton grumbled, standing on her tiptoes to hook out the box out. She shook a revolting amount of it into the tube, turning the black brew a cloudy beige. ‘We also found one of the Tower programmers in a flop in Delphi. They had a packed bag and a fortune in chip-cards strapped under their clothes. I assume they were fleeing the City, but someone got to them first.’

‘Nothing else? No reports from the Tower about anything...missing?’

‘No. We’ve still no idea what they attack was about. I take it from the questions that you do?’

‘Prisoner 22,’ Charlie said.

Confusion pinched Clayton’s eyebrows together. ‘Who?’

‘I don’t know,’ Charlie said. She swung her leg over the back of the chair and slid down into the seat. Her bones ached, the patched bundle of muscle fibres in her thigh pulled tight, but she’d always sat like this. She waited until Clayton perched on the couch opposite, syn-brew clasped between her hands. ‘From what I saw, the attack was aimed at extracting prisoner 22. Except according to the records, there is no prisoner 22. No name, no judgement docket and, apparently, no man hunt now that they are out.’  
Clayton was shaking her head. ‘That’s impossible, Charlie,’ she said. ‘21 prisoners in the Crates. Everyone in the City knows their names.’

  
‘There was an empty Crate, an internment docket and a dead hive,’ Charlie said. ‘There was someone in there, Captain, and the only people who knew who were my mom and Uncle Miles.’

  
Clayton started to say something, stopped herself and swore quietly instead. She stood up and stalked over to the window, twitching back the curtains to scowl out into the nanite-lit glow of the City.

‘If Miles knew something like that,’ she said slowly. ‘If there is - if there was - some secret prisoner in the Crates, then that could be the reason for the Delphi attack. Either to keep it quiet, or to try and get the information from him.’

Or something else, Charlie thought darkly. Something that sent Miles down into Delphi, that made him leave Charlie to die under those bricks. Or maybe...someone.

Clayton turned around. ‘Do you have any idea who could have been in that Crate?’ she asked. ‘Any hint at all?’

That was the question, wasn’t it. Charlie tasted copper pennies under her tongue as she said, ‘No. None.’

Business done, Clayton finished her syn-brew and took her leave with a promise to look into the missing Crate and a warning to Charlie to stay out of trouble. ‘And fights,’ Clayton added, squinting at Charlie’s bruises with a sympathetic grimace. She rubbed her thumb under her eye, tilting her head at Charlie. ‘Put a steak on that, ok?’

‘Sure.’

Just before she left, Clayton gave Charlie one last, searching look. It was like she knew there was something Charlie wasn’t telling her, and she was giving her the opportunity to spill. Before it was too late. Except it already was.

‘I miss Miles too, Charlie,’ Clayton said. ‘We’ll find out who did this to him.’

Maybe. Charlie closed the door and leaned against it, huffing out a tired breath. Except what if this was all Miles’ doing? Her stomach shied away from that thought, but her brain wouldn’t let it go.

What if this whole thing, from Delphi to Duncan, had been to get Prisoner 22 out of his Crate? She’d said it herself in the Tower. Prisoner 22 had been the one thing her Uncle and her mom had agreed on. What if that was because he was the one thing they’d ever had in common?

Maybe...maybe Prisoner 22 was Charlie’s Dad. 


	11. Chapter 11

 

Her shoulder still hurt. Charlie slouched at her desk, legs kicked out into everyone’s way, and flicked through the reports on the Tower. Apparently there was no more action required. The City believed that the wayward tech had been working along, he’d simply been… ‘disgruntled’.

Charlie snorted and rubbed her shoulder, digging her thumb in. That sounded likely. A clerk - disgruntled or not - with access to technology that could run rings around Rachel Matheson’s safeguards. And it was probably just a coincidence it was the second time it had happened.

No mention of the dead hive or compromised Crate.

A twitch of her fingers dismissed the files, the image scattering into smuts of ash and light. The gesture tweaked her shoulder again, the jab of pain making her wince. She just wished it was the only thing nagging at her. Last night, half-pissed and afraid, the notion her Dad had been the one cracked out of the Tower had seemed unlikely. A kid’s daydream that death wasn’t really real.

In the daylight, even filtered through the nano-shadowed windows so everything that made it sunshine instead of electric, Charlie was starting to believe it. She wasn’t sure she wanted to.

A rough hand gripped her shoulder, warm fingers digging into the cramp hard enough to make her gasp. It hurt enough to make her hiss, then the working fingers hit just the right spot and the strip of muscle melted like wax. The release made Charlie sigh and lean back into the touch, arching like a cat in satisfaction.

‘Damn, that’s good,’ she sighed.

‘I told you I was more than just a toaster,’ Monroe murmured into her ear. Its breath was warm, despite the fact its hands were stroking honey-heat into her muscles that still struck Charlie as strange. Who’d thought a bot should have warm breath - her mom or Baker? ‘Gotta tell you, Charlie, this is why people think you need a partner to watch your back.’

She shook her head and shifted from under its hands, rolling her chair away. ‘I had a partner. He didn’t do such a great job of that.’

Monroe leaned against the desk, crossing its arms. ‘I’m not Miles.’

‘Yeah, I know,’ Charlie said. ‘You’re programmed to be dependable right?’

It looked away, eyes flicking over the pen with a neutral attention. ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘I’m programmed to kill. I’m programmed to be damn good at it. I want to be your partner, Charlie.’

She was going to say something dismissive, a sneered denial of its ability to want. Somewhere between her brain and her tongue, it turned into, ‘Why?’

Monroe looked back at her, eyes strangely intense. It was a long silent moment before it gave her a cool, empty smile. ‘Who - what else do I have? I’m just a toaster, right? Not even the latest model, just a recalled antique to make do with.’

The bitterness caught an unexpected chord in Charlie. God knows, she’d had days she felt like something that should be on the scrapheap. It wasn’t nice.

‘Yeah,’ she said, drawing the word out over her tongue. ‘So was Miles though.’

She waited. Her reward was the grin and the laugh, a rough rattle of sound. Charlie knew her mom or Baker had programmed that sound in, made it. That didn’t, she supposed, make it any less Monroe’s own. Programmed or raised, no one got away with someone’s fingerprints on them. Especially not when Rachel Matheson was involved.

Charlie hesitated for a second, then reached out and grabbed a chair. It was Beck’s, but he was still undercover. She rolled it towards Monroe.

‘Sit,’ she said. Then, poked by habit and that lingering sense of connection. ‘Please.’

He - there didn’t seem any point in fighting it any more - gave her a slow, amused look and then sat down. It was where Miles used to sit, although Monroe didn’t quite get the ‘don’t give a shit’ sprawl of bone and muscle.

‘My turn,’ he said. ‘Why?’

‘When were you...’ she hesitated, groping for the right word.

‘Decommissioned? Put on ice? Turned off?’ Monroe suggested. His mouth quirked. ‘Sequestered for Baker’s pleasure?

Charlie grimaced. She picked up the clipped tin toy from her desk, spinning the wings to wind it up. ‘Any but the last.’

‘Five years ago,’ he said. ‘I was the last of my designation to be cold storaged.'

Charlie hesitated, who else did she have?

Clayton? No. If the Captain found out that Miles was crooked, she’d crate him herself. Charlie didn’t know if she could forgive him, but he was still family. She wanted to know why, before she decided what to do with him.

Rachel? Her mom was part of whatever Miles had been covering up, whatever had led to him disappearing in the middle of a firefight. If the bad guys found out she was talking to Charlie, if they realised she knew something about what was going on? That would make her a target.

There was an or, too. A pissy little nag in the back of Charlie’s brain, reminding her that Rachel was really good at justifying terrible things. That sometimes, she treated emotion like calculus that hurt. No. Charlie wasn’t going to work out what benefit would have made her mom consider her daughter’s arm an acceptable cost. Whatever secrets her mom was keeping, she wasn’t part of what happened in Delphi.

Please, God.

It was Monroe, or nothing.

Charlie decided with an abrupt nod of her chin. ‘Fine,’ she said. Her voice felt rough on her tongue, rasping like old steel. ‘Let go of me.’

He thought about it, then sat back. A shove of his feet sent the chair rolling back, wheels hissing on the extruded plas floor. Charlie got up and grabbed her jacket, the collar still torn from the brawl.

‘Come with me,’ she said. ‘I want to show you something.’

 

* * *

 

The tomb read ‘Daniel Gene Matheson - beloved son’. It was the only fresh tomb in the graveyard. Space was at a premium in the City. A lot of people donated their bodies to the City, science having one last crack at making them useful. Mostly because hardly anyone believed they were dying long enough to opt out of the donation programme. The religious stacked plas-wrapped bodies like mummies in big warehouses, taking them on pilgrimages over the Wall to find earth to bury them in.

A small cult of anarchists - dedicated to pissing Rachel off - insisted on sky burials. It had caused less disruption than they’d hoped. It turned out birds were pretty efficient predators. The only real problem had been the over-excited seagulls getting into a scrap.

Danny Matheson had gotten a proper burial, though. A plot in the ground, a hole six feet deep and a stone kept garnished with daisies. Being the Matheson’s only son, it got you in places.

Crouching next to the grave Charlie fingered the daisies, bruising the soft petals. ‘He hated flowers,’ she said. ‘They made him wheeze. I mean, everything made him wheeze but flowers especially.’

Monroe leaned against a pre-war mausoleum, an angel’s lichen-green wings casting a shadow over him. ‘He’s dead. If he’s wheezing, it’s probably good news.’

Irritation twitched her fingers, pulling a sunny-hearted flower off it’s stem. ‘Did Baker install the asshole chip new when he defrosted you?’

‘No. I picked thatup on the streets,’ Monroe said. ‘If this is about bonding, I’d have rather be invited to the fight last night.’

Charlie’s hands wanted to be doing something, brushing dust off the grave or plucking weeds from the grass. It was immaculate though. Polished. She brushed a finger over the D in the marble, pressing down on the rough edges.

‘No,’ she said. ‘That’s not it.’

She stood up and brushed her hands off. To be honest, she wasn’t even sure Danny was here. It wouldn’t be like Rachel to give up after 15 years of desperately trying to keep Danny alive. Charlie wouldn’t bet against the idea her brother’s real resting place was on ice in a lab somewhere, waiting for a way to fix death.

‘When Dad died they was nothing left to bury. Just grey sludge.’ Charlie’s lips went dry at the memory. She’d refused to believe he was dead, cried and screamed until she set Danny off. Rachel had picked her up - ignoring the kicking and flailing - and carried her down to the Bakery. Afterwards she’d apologised, but she couldn’t take back the memory of wet fluid with her Dad’s wristwatch floating in it. ‘Never saw a body. No DNA. No...’

‘Evidence.’

‘Exactly.’

Charlie patted Danny’s grave and turned away, walking through the flowers and flickering holo-tributes to the dead. The power packs were running out on most of them. It had been nearly a year since Memorial Day. Monroe strolled along beside her, hands clasped behind his back and head bowed like a monk.

‘Do you remember the raid on the Bakery?’ she asked.

‘No.’

She gave him a hard, sidelong look. ‘What? It slipped your mind?’

Monroe shrugged and tapped his temple. ‘I don’t have memories. I have chips. There are...holes. Things I should remember, but don’t. Gaps of minutes, some of days. Censorship, I guess, secrets better kept when no-one knows them. I was at the Bakery - I remember getting the call - but I’ve retained none of the information.’

Stopping next to a looping image of a laughing man, Charlie stared at Monroe for a second. Frustration burbled in her chest. He raised an eyebrow at her. 'What?'

'I spent all last night and most of this morning trying to work out of there was any way to prove something went done that night, something that isn't in the official record,' Charlie gritted out. She waved a finger at him. 'You're walking around with bits of your brain markered over as evidence.'

'In future, just ask,' he said placidly. 'Evidence of what? I can't see it remember?'

Charlie led the way over to a bench and got up on it, sitting on the back with her feet on the seat. He stayed standing, shifting his weight absently like he could get a cramp. She hadn't picked the cemetery just for the visual prompt of her brother's grave. All the little memorials were white noise. Half the city's crooks used it as a meeting place. The MMPD had tried to clear the place out under six different commanders, but people wouldn't hear of it.

'It was after the War,' she said. 'Mom had just released the first Hive and set up the City, it was the first time people had been safe in years. We had food, water, protection...and my Dad tried to destroy it all. No one knows why, everyone has theories.'

'It sounds like a story,' Monroe said. 'Once upon a time… I have an excuse, why don't you remember?'

'I remember some of it,' Charlie said. She rubbed her fingers together, feeling the filings in motor oil texture on her skin. 'Mom and Dad fighting a lot. Miles...Miles there, arguing with him. He said there was 'no point', or 'no prize'. I’m not sure. I was seven, people stopped arguing when I came into the room. Mostly I just remember all the tension. Mom never wanted to talk about it afterwards, but I thought it was grief. Now I think that she was hiding something. Someone.’

‘The Crate?’

Charlie nodded. ‘They lied about my Dad’s death, they Crated him with Pittman and they buried something that came back to bite them last year. Now Miles is on the run, and Rachel’s locked herself in the Manor like a high-tech Miss Havisham. I thought it was...’

There wasn’t a whole lot of humour in her laugh. Monroe looked askance at her and she shook her head, waving the silent question away. It had been stupid. She’d thought it was because of her, that Rachel was struggling with the thought she’d almost lost another child.

At least now, Charlie didn’t have to feel guilty about not visiting her. What was it Dad had always said, ‘Silver linings, princess’.

If she was right, maybe he still did.

Months of psychs teaching her to pin down her emotions and label them like butterflies, and she still wasn’t sure what the feeling cramping her chest was. Whatever it was, she couldn’t deal with it right now. She couldn’t think about what it’d mean if her Dad was alive, when he might not be.

No-one had ever been unCrated that she knew about. Rachel claimed it was possible, that Crating was more impermanent than a death sentence, but that could just be propaganda. No-one really knew. No-one had ever tried.

‘And Duncan?’ Monroe asked. He lowered himself onto the bench, settling himself with the care of a man whose bones are heavier than they looked. ‘How is she involved? If she is part of the conspiracy, why leave her behind?’

‘She’s not as important as we thought she was?’ Charlie hazarded. Even to her, it sounded unsure. Duncan and Peeping Tom stuck out like a sore thumb in the middle of her theory. Just because they didn’t fit yet, didn’t mean she was wrong. She just needed more information. ‘We need to talk to someone who was there at the time.’

‘Clayton’s out,’ Monroe said. ‘The minute she finds out your theory, you’ll be back on psych leave.’

‘It’s not crazy,’ Charlie protested. ‘It makes sense, the censored patches in your memory prove that.’

‘It isn’t. You are,’ Monroe pointed out. ‘Or at least, that’s what your psych eval says. Paranoid delusions, remember, and parental issues. Now you’ve found a conspiracy that involves your mother… If we could work in your sexual dysfunction it would be textbook.’

‘I...hold on, what?’ Charlie spluttered. ‘My what?’

‘Oh yeah, your last psych session apparently. You were-’ he blinked and tilted his head, reading off something only he could see ‘You were evasive and uncomfortable, denying masturbation and getting defensive when assbutt was brought up.’

‘Of course I was evasive, they were asking me-’ Charlie stopped, biting her tongue. ‘OK, don’t read my psychiatric reports anymore. That’s invasion of my privacy.’

‘Please, like you’ve told them anything in months,’ Monroe said. ‘They should have asked me. I could tell them how often-’

‘Shut up.’

‘I’m just saying, whatever problems you had seem to have cleared up since you partnered with me.’

Charlie bolted to her feet, heat flushing through her chest. If she’d...what she thought about at night was down to her. ‘I don’t. I wouldn’t...’

‘No shame in it,’ Monroe said. ‘I was made pretty...and fully functional. In case you were wondering.’

‘I wasn’t.’ Charlie gritted out. Well, she hadn’t been. She reached back and tugged her hair, tightening the ponytail. Game face, remember. She shoved - whatever thoughts - into the back of her head. ‘Enough. We need to Baker, everyone else is either a suspect or -’

‘Might arrest your suspects?’

‘Yeah,’ Charlie admitted quietly. ‘I appreciate you keeping this to yourself.’

‘It’s another flaw in our programming,’ Monroe said, getting up. ‘My loyalty’s to you. Not Clayton, not the City. Of course, there is one problem.’

‘What?’

He shrugged and fell in alongside her, elbow nudging hers. ‘Baker downloads my brain every night. So if he’s one of your suspects...’

Charlie groaned, but not loud enough to drown Monroe out. ‘...you’ll need to sort me out alternative living arrangements.’


	13. Chapter 13

  
  


Someone had gotten to the Bakery before them.

Maybe if Charlie hadn’t been thinking about her Dad so much, she’d not have put it together. She’d just have stepped in the slick puddle and dismissed it as water or oil or grease. The City could be grubby, under the sheen of nanotech excreted technology. 

Instead she crouched down and dipped prosthetic fingers into the oil, data analysis jumping the connection between her arm and nervous system. Biological waste and the degrading shells of a dead hive. Without the access codes, the nanites couldn’t access replication protocols. They were short-lived as mayflies, and considerably more deadly.

‘Shit,’ she mouthed. Standing up, Charlie backed away from the entrance. Her eyes flickered over the nearby buildings as she pulled her gun. The Bakery was built along the dark side of the Wall - no wifi, no active Hives to interfere. The problem was, that made the location attractive to other, less civic businesses. Delphi was under a mile from here. ‘Monroe. We’ve an intrusion. Alert the MMPD.’

He shook his head. ‘It’s Dark, Charlie. Communications in and out are hard-wired only.’

Shit. Again.

Keeping one eye on the dark windows for any movement, Charlie retreated to the car, popping the truck. She swapped her standard issue pistol out for an assault coil, slinging the heavy gun over her shoulder. It was riot use only, but Charlie wasn’t going down into the dark again. Not unless she was better armed than whatever was down there.

‘Right. The Dark ends...’ Charlie turned slightly, mapping the City in her head. She pointed. ‘North. At the intersection of Memorial and Cleveland. Get there and raise the alarm.’

Monroe grunted and grabbed a coil from the weapon’s cache, hands moving on autopilot as he checked ammo and trigger. ‘Or I could not do that. Told you, Charlie, my loyalty’s to my partner.’

‘That was an order, MNR,’ she snapped. It was odd how different his name sounded when reduced to three letters. 

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I got that.’

He adjusted the gun, angling it across his body, and waited.

Arguing would just take time that they might not have. Charlie gave in with a frustrated grunt and zipped her jacket to the chin, trying not to suck her breath in as the armour panels contoured themselves to her boobs and ribs. She ran her hand down the butt of the gun to the interface, blinking as soft red targeting sights overlaid her vision. 

One advantage of getting your arm shot off, you didn’t have to use the clunky gloves and glasses. Silver linings, right, Dad?

‘Once we’re inside, tap into the first fibreline you can get,’ she told him. ‘I want back up here, and containment. If the Hives are compromised, we could have a serious situation.’

They didn’t have the replication protocol. If they managed to get out of the Dark zone, that could change. Even if they didn’t get out, no-one wanted to turn a square mile or more of the City into seeping puddles of extruded waste.

Monroe nodded. ‘Don’t worry, Charlie. I’ve got your back.’

After the Tower, she guessed she kind of believed him. ‘Ok then. Lets go save Jeremy, before someone sticks something frosty up his ass.’

She headed for the front door, finger sweaty on the coil trigger and heart doing that twitchy, nervous thud thing, as if her chest had gotten too small all of a sudden. Behind her Monroe muttered, ‘I  knew  it,’ and she was surprised into a quick, tight grin. Then they were through the front door.

The low ceilings and heat were even more impressive than usual. Every footstep seemed to echo off the low tiled walls, even Charlie’s breathing sounded loud in her ears. Old habit made her gesture, fingers sketching out a plan. Miles would have known what it meant, she’d learned the shorthand from him. 

Monroe nodded and peeled off to the left, checking the nest of unused corridors hiving off into the ruins while Charlie covered him. Most of them were blocked off - years ago, by Rachel - but a few were still open. Baker called them his treadmill, roaming around them like someone else taking a walk in the park. Someone else could have got access.

Eventually he stopped and held up his hand, gesturing they’d found the entry point. Charlie went to check it out. Scorch marks on the walls and scrape lines in the floor. They hadn’t only come in this way, they’d brought something with them.

‘No exit,’ Monroe said.

She squinted at him dubiously, and he tapped a finger to the side of his eye. Circuitry flashed briefly over the pretty blue of them. ‘Heat signatures. Only goes out. Not long ago.’

Charlie shook her head. Sometimes she felt like she might as well be a robot - hive-bound, cybernetically patched, robotics - and then Monroe reminded her human and limited she still was.

‘Sometimes I wish I’d lost an eye instead,’ she muttered. ‘The upgrades are more useful.’

Monroe snorted. ‘You don’t take care of your arm, you really going to pop out an eye and clean it all the time?’

‘I have hygiene,’ Charlie said. Ignoring his snort of disagreement she scuffed her foot over the scuff lines. Bomb? ‘Get to a fibreline, I’m going after Baker.’

She ducked away before he could argue, loping along the betraying yellow line pointing the way to the Bakery. If Monroe was right, the intruders could still be here. If they’d hurt Baker - Charlie’s finger tightened on the coil trigger, the targeting discs flashing solid red in her vision. Whatever he’d done, whatever he’d covered up, the reclusive scientist was still family.

Slowing down as she approached the Bakery, she pressed in tight to the wall. As she got closer the sound of voices filtered out to her.

‘You should have known this was coming, Jeremy.’

‘Seriously?’ Baker asked. ‘I should have known people were going to be coming back from the dead? No one told me I was in the Evil Dead.’

‘You always had a smart mouth.’

‘Smart enough.’

Something clattered. A gun fired and someone cursed, voice rough and angry. There was the sound of a scuffle and a grunt of pain. Jeremy wasn’t a fighter. 

‘MMPD,’ Charlie yelled, hoping the echoes hid the crack in her voice. ‘This is a restricted area. Put your weapons down.’

‘We can’t do that.’

Instinct threw Charlie down, tucking and rolling away from the wall. It collapsed behind her, blasted into splinters and gravel. Shrapnel from the explosion pricked her jaw and worked into her hair, scratching at the back of her neck. Her ears were ringing.

Get  up.

Sweat drenched Charlie, her jacket rubbing under her arms, and her stomach twisted up under her ribs. She licked salt off her lips. It wasn’t Delphi. She wasn’t green. It wasn’t the same.

The smell of cordite and damp in the darkness. Someone was panting. It took Charlie a minute to realise it was her.

Get up.

She shoved herself up on one arm, grabbing the gun with the other. Her legs thought about it a minute before deciding they’d take her weight. She staggered through the dust and smoke into the Bakery.

Danny lay dead and dismembered on the ground. His head in a corner, blue eyes looking at her accusingly. A hand curled under her feet, making her lurch to the side and crack her shoulder off the wall. Her stomach lurched with that familiar ‘did I hurt him?’ feeling. Racks of pre-constructed, partially burned DNMs were scattered over the floor. Puddles of molten metal spat and darkened on the pitted ground.

‘Charlie!’ Baker yelled, struggling against the dark armoured men trying to shove him into a crate. ‘Get out of her. Run-’

A black sheathed fist punched Baker in the face, knocking him back into the coffin. ‘Seal him,’ the man growled. He turned, swinging a sleek grey gun up into his arms. Bullpup Mayhem, Charlie id’d it, molten explosive rounds. That explained what happened to the wall. She dove behind one of the reinforced metal tables, feeling the heat of the blast hitting her hip. When she scrambled onto her knees, there were charred holes in her reinforced leggings. 

She fired around the side of the table, strafing at knee height. The shot didn’t pierce the armour, but the impact knocked their legs from under them. Charlie took advantage of the disorder to scramble from one shelter to the next, her heart beating sickly as she wedged herself in beside her brother’s upside down torso. 

‘Reinforcements from the MMPD are on their way,’ she said, pressing her shoulders flat against the wall. ‘Leave Baker, get out while you can.’

‘And if we don’t.’

‘You’ll be going back to the Tower,’ Charlie said, testing the theory aloud. ‘This time the guards won’t be dosed.’

He laughed. ‘Good work putting that together, girl. It’s just a shame you won’t get to tell...’

Charlie shoved herself to her feet and fired, throwing the man and two of the thugs off their feet. They bounced when they hit the floor, Charlie’s gun humming as it reloaded. She boosted herself over the table and went for the one still standing, driving her knee into his gut and her elbow into his face. His jaw snapped - popping grotesquely out of the side of his face - and he hit the dirt.

Inside the Crate, Jeremy was hammering his fists against the sealed lid. Blood from split knuckles smeared with sweat on the clear surface. Charlie fumbled at the side of the box, looking for some sort of emergency release. There had to be one surely. If there was, though, she couldn’t find it.

On the floor, the remaining three men were stirring. One of them rolled onto his side, reaching for the gun. Charlie gave up on finesse and punched the top of the Crate. The plastic groaned and cracked, a spiderweb of cracks fissuring out from impact. She cocked her fist back again, and then the molten round caught her on the arm. 

Impact and hot metal sheared the synth-flesh off metal bones. It didn’t hurt. The Hive wasn’t programmed to translate that sensation. It still did. An old, hot, familiar pain - shattered bones she could feel moving in a hand that wasn’t there anymore.

Get up. Get up. Get up. It wasn’t  real.  Charlie shoved the panic away and pushed herself to her feet. The arm was damaged, not broken. She was damaged, not broken.

Except she didn’t. Her body wouldn’t move, and she couldn’t stop the weak, little, panicked noises whimpering out of her. It wasn’t Delphi. There wasn’t a building holding her down. No one was coming to save her.

She had to GET UP.

Boots appeared in her line of her vision. She heard the click-hiss of the bullpup loading  and  the distant screams and explosions in Delphi, losing track of memory and reality. Her breath rattled in her ribs, scraping her throat.

‘Sorry, kid,’ the man said. ‘No witnesses.’

Charlie could feel the heat of the gun against her cheek. She closed her eyes and waited. A gun fired, but instead of hot oblivion there was cool air on her cheek. After a second her brain picked out a note that didn’t fit the dark, creaking rubble of Delphi, a winded voice swearing.

Someone grabbed her by the collar and yanked her unceremoniously out of the room, dragging her into the corridor. ‘Charlie?’ Monroe propped her up against the wall, his hand curling around her neck and into her hair. ‘Charlotte, look at me.’

She shook her head. ‘I...can’t.’ The words struggled to get out between breaths as she hyperventilated. ‘I can’t. I can’t.’

Monroe shook her roughly, making her head bobble on her neck like a doll. ‘Fuck that,’ he said roughly. ‘You can. I’ve seen you. Come on, Charlie. I need you. You got my back?’

She sucked in a breath and managed to hold it. Her stomach was lurching behind her ribs, hot acid scalding the back of her throat. She still managed a shaky nod. ‘I got your back.’ 

He dragged her up to her feet, hooking one arm around her waist. Charlie’s arm hung from her shoulder, fingers twitching in a spasmodic spider dance. That didn’t matter. She could shoot with both hands. 

‘Go,’ she said, shoving Monroe. ‘They can’t get out of here with Baker.’

He hesitated. ‘You’ll be ok.’

She sneered. Hopefully. God knew what it looked like from the outside, it felt like crap from the inside. ‘I can take care of myself.’

Monroe touched her face. His fingers lingered on her cheek, then he leant in and kissed her. Just once, a soft brush of his lips over hers. Charlie gaped at him, too shocked to think of anything to say. Then he was gone, blurring into the lab and a wall of explosions and ordnance. 

 


	14. Chapter 14

 

Her ribs were broken. Charlie took a deep breath, grimacing at the sharp jab of pain that flashed through her chest. It wasn’t good enough. She reached over with her good hand and dug her knuckles in until she had tears in her eyes. 

Real pain.  Now  pain. It functioned like an anchor to the here and now. Her head was still full of dark places and chaos, but it retreated back to the outskirts where it lived. The only thing that stayed was the pain in her arm, a dull throb that set her teeth on edge.

Charlie sniffed and wiped her nose on the back of her sleeve. She tasted salt at the back of her eyes, a trickle itching the back of her throat. Looking down she took stock of the rest of her injuries.

The molten round had caught her elbow, blasting off pseudoflesh down to her wrist and scabbing the metal bones with pocks. Heat had fused the plates of her body-armour, turning them ashy grey and brittle. Charlie unzipped her jacket and struggled out of it, letting it drop to the ground. Deformed nuggets of dried metal dropped out of it and rolled over the floor. The shirt she’d been wearing under it was charred in places, the skin raw under it.

Not that bad. She could still fight.

She dropped her head back against the wall - skull thudding against concrete - and closed her eyes. One more breath. Just one. Charlie breathed in, out and pushed herself off the wall. Her fingers thumped and juddered against the butt of her gun as she gripped it, ignoring her attempt to control them.

The Bakery was...slagged. The walls and floor were cracked and pitted, pocked with steaming silver acne. All the DNM chassis' were unrecognisable, synth-skin burned down to silver bone. It should have made it easier, but it still hurt. 

No time for that. Charlie wiped her face on her sleeve - still sweating  after her episode - and kept going. The trail of destruction led into Baker's storage - where discontinued models like Monroe were kept in cold storage. It was dark, the lights fused and shattered. Charlie paused and flexed her hand against the gun, trying to spoof the connection through the damage. She got a flash of an amber sight in one eye, but it jittered back and forth across her field of vision and winked out again.

'Shit,' Charlie muttered. Shifting her grip on the gun to free one hand, she patted down her pockets. Miles always carried a torch with him - Charlie remembered seeing the beam of light disappearing into the rain under Delphi - but she had something almost as good.

It had been a gift from her mom, back when they could trade them without looking for strings. 

' So that you know, you're never alone,' Rachel had said. 'That I'm always watching.'

Charlie had kept it because... She'd kept it. Now she fished the old charm out of her pocket and thumbed it on, the silver tab flickering blue. A handful of lights appeared in response, filling the air around her like fireflies. That was all they did, so they didn’t need the codes to connect. She watched the swarm fill the air around her hand. They had always enchanted her as a child. They had lost some of their charm after nanites killed her Dad, but right now the glimmer of them shoved the panic back into its box.

‘Besides,’ Charlie muttered, venturing into the tunnel. ‘If Dad’s alive, I’ll owe you guys an apology.’

Her feet splashed in water, the tunnel was flooding. Looping the cord of the charm around her fingers, Charlie held it out to a freezer. The nanites clustered around her figures, casting reflections into the glass freezers. Bodies sagged as the blocks of ice defrosted, elbows and nose-tips appearing out of the permafrost.

Charlie cursed under her breath. Habit had her reaching to activate the uplink to the MMPD, getting static in her ear instead of answers. She toggled it off again, taking a deep breath through her nose. Without a working Hive and the proper codes, they were just puppets. The response team would be here before they could become a problem.

Two corners and ten foot later she found her missing robot  and  that she’d been wrong. Monroe lay sprawled in a deep puddle of water, legs caught awkwardly under him as if he’d been running when he went down. Behind him the maw of an empty freezer gaped, the edges of the glass smoked and melted. Whatever had been inside was gone.

‘Great,’ Charlie muttered. 

She dropped to her knees next to Monroe and got her arm under his shoulder, rolling him onto his back. His face was blank. It was...odd...to realise how much of  him  there was. She’d never realised until it was gone. She rolled his eyelid back with her thumb, fingers pressing along the line of his cheekbone. No reaction. Charlie sat back on her heels and looked around at the dark alcoves and melting freezers. Some sort of EMP? The electronics down here weren’t hardened. There had never seemed much point.

No point in wondering about it now either. The techs could work it out when they got here.

‘I’ll be back,’ she told Monroe, like he could hear her. It was stupid, but she couldn’t just leave him without a word. She pushed herself to her feet, body protesting, and kept going. 

There was no sign of the kidnappers and no sign of Baker. After the second turn that she wasn’t sure was right, Charlie stopped. She stood for a second, then punched her flesh and bone hand into the wall.

‘If you  hurt  him,’ she yelled, voice cracking and rough. ‘I will fucking kill you, you hear me? Forget crating, you’ll just be dead.’

She waited, but there was no answer. Not even the ghost of moving air. With a final, frustrated snarl she turned and stalked back to Monroe. He was too heavy to move, even if she dragged him by his heels, so she slid down onto the floor. She brushed his hair back from his face. ‘Told you I’d be back.’


	15. Chapter 15

 

One of the DNM’s offered Charlie the coat off its back. She flinched away from the empty gesture - just because she’d got used to Monroe didn’t mean she’d reconciled herself to these things being around. They weren’t the same. Monroe was a person, sorta, she supposed. These were just neatly made shells.

‘Here.’ Jason draped a jacket over Charlie’s shoulders. It was heavy and warm from his body, the smell of him worked into the stitches and lining. Charlie wanted to huddle into it and scrape it for her skin all at once.

‘Thanks,’ she said instead, gritting her teeth and squirming to get her arms into the sleeves. Jason’s arms were long enough that the cuffs hung down to her fingers, hiding her ruined arm from the easily upset public. Maybe, she thought wryly as she tugged the jacket straight, she could stick with this and skip the visit back to the labs. ‘Anything?’

Jason dismissed the DNM, ordering it back to the evacuation effort. Once they were alone he shook his head. ‘No sign of them, no sign of Baker. Nothing.’ He squinted at her. ‘Charlie, how’d you know to come down here? There was no alarm, no communication until that MNR accessed the hardline.’

‘Luck,’ Charlie said, shrugging and meeting his eyes guilelessly. The lie was easy, the truth wouldn’t have been. ‘I just came down to see Baker, and stumbled into the middle of it.’

Raising his eyebrows, Jason cast a sceptical glance over the grimy, dark-wall surroundings. ‘Not a popular off-shift locale.’

‘He’s a friend of the family,’ Charlie said. The sudden gawky awkwardness in Jason’s posture was familiar, it was his ‘oh yeah, her mom’s  the  Matheson’ shiftiness. There had been a time Charlie thought it was cute, or at least a sign he wasn’t using her. Now that she wasn’t sleeping with him, it was just useful. ‘He knew my Dad. I used to call him Unca Jeremy. Baker doesn’t leave the Bakery, so I come here.’

‘Oh. Right,’ Jason muttered. He rubbed the back of his neck absently and glanced sidelong at his DNM. ‘Look, Charlie, I know you aren’t...that you didn’t...’

He stopped and looked around, then leaned in too close to Charlie. One hand gripped her elbow and his voice was low and urgent against her ear. ‘First Delphi? Now this? My Dad thinks that you and Miles...I don’t know. I  don’t know.  He won’t tell me anything, but mother warned me to keep my distance from you. So...’

Charlie gently took her elbow back. ‘So you listened?’

He flushed, the colour dark under light brown skin. ‘That’s not fair. I thought you were dead, good as dead. The doctors thought you’d never wake up. I needed...I still had a life.’

Charlie took a deep breath and waved his explanation away impatiently. ‘Shut up. It’s not important.’

He looked hurt, deep brown eyes going soulful. ‘It was to me.’

‘OK, look, I don’t care. Yeah, I’m still angry about the break-up. That’s because I was in a coma when it happened, so I missed a lot of it. You weren’t, so either man up or get your girlfriend to dry your puppy eyes. This?’ She waved a finger back and forth between them. ‘Isn’t important. That?’ She pointed at the ruins of the Bakery, where maintenance droids were hauling tanks of human-shaped weapons out in opaque containment units. ‘That is. Now, if you’ll excuse me? I want to be there when my partner comes around.’

‘Like I wasn’t there for you?’

‘Like he might have seen something relevant before he got hit by the EMP blast,’ Charlie said. She shoved Jason out of her way and headed for her car. Halfway there she stopped, turned and walked back. ‘Oh, and by the way, I’m not scared of your Dad. You can tell him that, along with everything else.’

She shoved his jacket back into his hand and left him standing there holding it. The tech van with Monroe loaded into the back was just folding up its ramp when she loped up.

‘I’m riding along,’ she said, flashing her ID. The DNM stared at it with blank blue eyes and then at her.

‘That isn’t standard practice.’

‘Don’t care. Move.’

There was another pause, dim lights flickering under the thick synth skin as the DNM consulted his protocols. It must have come out in Charlie’s favour, but it moved out of her way. She jumped up into the back of the van, ignoring the sound of it getting up in after her. 

Monroe was strapped to the side of the van, thick webs of nanofibre mesh buckled around his arms and chest. His eyes were clamped open, wires plugged into the pupils, and the skin of his forearms had been peeled back to expose metal bones and circuitry.

‘Is that necessary?’ Charlie objected. ‘He’s not a piece of machinery.’

‘Yes,’ the DNM said. ‘He is.’

The van jolted into motion. Charlie staggered, grabbing the strap across Monroe’s chest for balance. The DNM didn’t even shift, just stood in front of the van doors like a bouncer at a club. Only instead of stopping her getting in…

Charlie tightened her fingers on the strap, knuckles showing white through grubby skin. There should be no way for a DNM to be compromised. Of course, there should be no way for anyone to have infiltrated the Bakery or disable the hives. 

The van jolted along the road and the DNM stared at her with Danny’s blank, empty face. The eyes were wrong, Charlie realised abruptly. She spent most of her time  not  looking at DNMs faces - looking past their ears, or focusing on their collars, or just pretending she couldn’t see them at all - but Danny had washed out blue eyes. This one had glassy black. Rachel had been precise with everything else, right down to the scar on his lip where he’d fallen on a lego knight. She wouldn't have gotten Danny’s eyes wrong. Charlie hung on to Monroe’s strap, shoulder bumping against his chest. Her mind was racing. There had been dozens of prefabbed DNMs in the Bakery, it wouldn't have been hard to strip one down for parts. 

Her mind tried to weasel out from under the details of that, but she pinned it down and made it look. They'd degloved her brother's face and taped it to the front of a different android. 

‘You aren't a DNM are you?’ she asked, keeping her voice low and steady.

The van swerved left, making her shift her weight. Charlie tried to map the route out in her brain, estimating their route through the city. They weren't heading for the MMPD labs, she was pretty sure of that. 

'Where are we going?'

The DNM blinked for the first time, as if the question had reminded it that it was supposed to pretend. Red lines pulsed around its eye socket. ‘Home. If you behave, there is no reason for us to hurt you.'

'Liar.'

'I am not programmed to lie. My protocols are not that advanced.' The voice was wrong too. Charlie grimaced at herself for missing that. She'd gotten used to thinking of the DNMs voices as 'flat', but they were just inflectionless. It was different. This android's voice was lower than Danny's had been, the words didn't flow together seamlessly. 

'Then someone is feeding you false information,' Charlie said. 'Because I'm not getting out of this alive.'

Danny tilted his head. 'That would be regrettable, but within the parameters of my mission.'

It had been worth a try. Some of the older models had been designed to preserve human lives, but over the years they’d been destroyed, sacrificed themselves during the wars, or just gotten scrapped for parts that could kill. Rachel made weapons, they lasted longer.

The van jolted under Charlie’s feet, juddering as the tyres jolted over a ...grate? Cattle grid? Charlie knew the City as well as anyone, the truncated streets, the walled off no-go areas. Miles and Nora might pick a street from memory and find it gone, but the this had never been Philly to Charlie. Not in any real way. She’d been a child when the world ended, her world had been the house, the hospital and the garden.

Heading down to Prospect? Or up to Bryn?

Charlie bit the inside of her lip, chewing in frustration until she tasted blood. Without some sort of visual landmark to spin her map around, she was as lost as one of her mom’s Temple genius’s out in the real world.

‘Where’s home?’ she asked. The fake-DNM just stared at her. She gave it a tight smile and took a step back, trailing her hand along Monroe’s arm. ‘Is telling me against protocol?’

It blinked those glassy eyes once. She  ‘No. Outside,’ it said. ‘Home is outside.’

‘Do you work for Duncan?’

‘No.’ 

‘Who do you work for?’ Charlie’s fingers touched the flensed flap of Monroe’s arm. It was slick and tepid, lubricant gel stinging her fingertips. 

It started to answer and then stopped, red flickering in its glossy eyes. ‘No. I am not to tell you anything else. We didn’t want to take you.’

‘Story of my life,’ Charlie said, mouth twisting. She twisted her fingers in the wires plugged into Monroe’s arm and yanked them out. They were out of the dark zone. Without the lab’s tech monitoring him, the Hive did what it was meant to do. Blue eyes snapped open and he moved, stopped and looked down at himself.

‘Kinky,’ he said. His voice always sounded like he’d just woken up, Charlie knew she was just imagining the extra husk to it. ‘But to be honest, Matheson, you’re not my type.’

Charlie ignored him and wrenched at the probes, unravelling the bare leads from the panels of the van. The wire sliced through her hands, slicing paper thin cuts into her skin. She turned just in time to get hit by the DNM-fake. It clothes-lined her to the floor, the impact rattling the van, and turned back to Monroe. Something small and silver glittered in its hand, blue light making Monroe look pallid.

It took a second for Charlie to catch her breath, her lungs balled up under her ribs in shock from the impact. She rolled over and shoved herself gracelessly to her feet, staggering on rubbery legs. The seam at the back of the fake’s head wasn’t perfect. She could see the mis-matched weave of its hair and the gape where the nape hadn’t sealed properly. 

‘That was my brother’s face, you son-of-a-bitch,’ she wheezed, stabbing the probe into the gap. It ripped the synth-skin and scraped on metal. Charlie angled it up and shoved, throwing her weight behind it so it punched up into the fake’s skull.

Habit made designers put vital functions there. Even Rachel’s machines, and she was the one who’d pointed out it made no sense to Charlie. As the probe drilled home, the fake shuddered and let out a staticky whine. Its legs went from under it and it dropped, the weight of it catching on Charlie’s arms. The leads had gotten caught around her arms, tangled in her feet, during the scrum. She got dragged down with it, landing on top of it at Monroe’s feet.

‘If this is a sex game,’ Monroe commented blandly. ‘We should talk to your psychs. They have a lot to work on in your squishy stuff that they don’t even suspect.’

She wrenched herself free of the tangles and dragged herself back up on one of the stacked crates. Her chest still hurt and there was a stitch niggled under her ribs. It took a second before she could push herself off the crate and stagger over to Monroe. 

‘We’re being kidnapped,’ she said, freeing one arm. Luckily, for all their hi-tech, the bad guys seemed to have just stolen the MMPD tech van. So her bio-key still worked. ‘They’re heading outside.’

‘Technically I’m being stolen,’ Monroe reminded her. He managed to sound smug, either that she’d forgotten or that he’d gotten to correct her. Charlie snorted at him and dropped to her knee to uncuff his ankle. 

‘Yeah, well technically I’m surplus baggage,’ she said. ‘They were after you.’

She tugged the last strap free and he offered her a hand up, pulling her to her feet. He touched her face, thumb careful against her cheek as he traced her bruises.

‘You look like hell,’ he told her. Then he glanced up and around, circuits moving under his skin. ‘I’ve lost approximately an hour, so I assume I was put out of commission somehow during the fight?’

‘EMP, I think,’ Charlie said. He was still stroking her cheek. It made her… Something. She stepped away from him, unaccountably flustered and even more unaccountably wishing she’d done something with her hair. Like a chignon would distract from the bruises, burns and general ground beef look she was currently sporting. ‘You were out for the count until we hit the edge of the dead zone.’

‘Baker?’

That brought Charlie back to the ground with a bump. They had more to worry about than her hair, or the way her skin tingled under his touch. She tightened her mouth, ignoring the sting of her lip.

‘Gone. I couldn’t catch the kidnappers.’ She stepped over the fake-DNM and tried the doors to the van. Unlike the straps, they’d bothered to reprogram the lock. Her bio key didn’t work. ‘

‘Why take him and not me?’

‘If your pride is hurt, this might not be the best time to-’ Charlie broke up with a yelp as Monroe scooped her up and slung her over his shoulder. Her ribs - which had definitely passed fractured into broken - howled at the manhandling. The pain took a minute to master. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Getting out,’ he said. ‘Hold on.’

He kicked the door out, metal screaming as it ripped apart. One hung on, bouncing off the road and making the van swerve and wobble. The other flew off, spinning into the traffic behind them like a clumsy frisbee. Horns blasted as the vehicles veered and braked to avoid it.

‘Shit,’ Charlie muttered, grabbing Monroe’s belt. She dug her nails into the tough leather and tucked her head down into the small of his back as he jumped out of the moving car.

He hit the tarmac and pitched forwards, knees and one out-stretched hand taking the impact. The old road crackled and lifted, bunching like fabric against his palm. Cars zipped past them, the hive navigation cutting close enough that Charlie could feel their wake shoving at her. She slid off Monroe’s shoulder and onto her backside. It was getting harder to breathe. That wasn’t good. 

One bright red car had no-where to go, blocked in either side by traffic. The driver hit the brakes, acrid smoke boiling out around the tyes. Behind the windscreen, a middle-aged woman with indeterminate hair pulled a horrified face and threw her hands up over her face. Useful. Charlie wrapped her arms around her aching ribs and tried to roll out of the way. A black clad leg blocked her. 

Monroe put his hand out and the car hit it, giving like foil around the point of impact. The back of it fish tailed around and he shoved it sideways into another car, doors and fenders crumpling into each other. Frankensteined together, the two cars jolted up onto the pavement and smashed into a wall.

Bits of glass shattered over the pavement and someone started screaming, a shrill, wobbling, rabbit howl.

The air tasted like burned rubber and Charlie’s heart wasn’t sure whether it should be racing or stopping. 

‘They went to all this bother to grab me,’ Monroe said conversationally, offering her a hand. ‘Why not just take me when I was helpless? Why do it this way?’

Charlie stared up at him. Someone was screaming, someone wasn’t - or couldn’t - and he didn’t care. It occurred to her that maybe his programming wasn’t as hard as Baker had thought. 

‘They could be hurt,’ she said, nodding at the tangle of metal and fractured plastic. Something coughed and one of the hoods whoofed into flame, the fire floating almost serenely over the bubbling metal. ‘You need to get them out.’

He glanced over and shrugged. ‘The hive will already have fire and rescue on the way,’ he said. ‘They’ll be fine until I get you safe.’

Charlie grabbed his hand and let him pull her to her feet. She thought about acting like it didn’t hurt, but he could tell her sleeping habits by her circulation. So it probably wasn’t much of a challenge to work out she was hurting. She limped over to a clear stretch of pavement and slid down onto the kerb, hunching over around her aches and pains.

‘I’m fine,’ she said. Monroe snorted at her and she shoved at his knee. ‘Fine enough. Get them out of the car. I’m not in danger. Go.’


	16. Chapter 16

 

Hospitals shouldn’t smell of solder and hot metal. This one did. Charlie sat on the narrow, uncomfortable bench in the hall and chewed the inside of her lip until she tasted blood. It was slick and salty on her tongue, making her stomach hiccup uneasily when she swallowed. She could feel the scritch and shift of the med-hive nanites piecing her bones back together, stretching marrow out like taffy. Her bones  itched  on the inside. That was wrong.

Her arm was strapped down across her chest. The jitter had spread up her arm, turning into a broken, spasmodic dance. Her fingertips were pattering against her collarbone like they were trying to tell her something in morse code. Maybe they were, maybe she should have learned it.

Or - Charlie braced her feet against the floor and shoved her slouching body upright against the wall - maybe the doctor had given her the good drugs this time round. About time.

She rubbed her good fingers against her eyes, trying to access the uplink to the MMPD hive. It was dead, slaved to the med-hive so it didn’t interfere in their work. Charlie grunted in irritation and dropped her hand. Maybe if she went outside… 

‘Sit,’ Clayton said, appearing just as she braced herself to stand. She walked down the shabby, bleached corridor and handed Charlie a cup of synth. Clayton’s free hand dropped on Charlie’s shoulder, pressing her down. ‘Stay.’

‘We don’t have time for this,’ Charlie protested. ‘The suspects got away with Baker and how many weaponised chassis?’

Clayton leaned against the wall opposite, mouth twisting. ‘Too many,’ she acknowledged, voice sour. An upraised finger gestured Charlie back down into her seat when she started up again. ‘They won’t get away, Charlie. The walls are locked down, nothing gets in or out without us scanning every inch and wheel well. Whoever they are, whatever they had planned, it isn’t going to work now. They are trapped in the City, and we’ll find them.’

Not if it was Miles they wouldn’t. Charlie chewed that disagreement off the tip of her tongue. Even now, the consequences literally tapping her on her shoulder, she wasn’t ready to betray him. Not yet. 

‘I should be there,’ she said.

‘No, you need to be here,’ Clayton said. She glanced at her wrist - that antique watch and Miles were the only foibles she’d ever allowed herself. ‘It won’t be long now. Once you’re patched up, then you can help us hunt through the trash down Delphi all you want. OK.’

It was more of a grimace than a smile, but Clayton seemed happy to take it. She checked her watch again and pushed herself off the wall. 

‘Which is what I should be doing,’ she said. The corner of her mouth tilted ruefully. ‘Well, after I beg off my niece’s birthday party anyhow. Charlie, it’s enough. Whoever’s behind this might have Baker and the chassis, but they don’t have the hives and they can’t get out of the City. You’ve saved the day, Charlie. It’s enough. You’re a Matheson already, you don’t have to be Miles.’

She slapped Charlie on the shoulder, her hand warm and solid, then she left. Charlie tilted her head back against the wall and stared at the tiled ceiling. Niece. She’d know - in abstract - that Clayton had a family, a life. It was odd to hear about it. So a niece, a sister or a brother. Probably not parents. Few people Clayton’s age had parents.

Still, it was a family. The sort of people who’d come to visit you in hospital.

The hospital had informed Rachel that Charlie was here. She’d heard them make the call, and a shiny MM van had driven up with a shiny new crated arm inside. No Rachel, though. Charlie didn’t know why she was...not even surprised, disappointed, she guessed.

‘Idiot,’ she muttered, her voice echoing off the walls. Standing up, awkward with her spasming arm fighting her balance, she headed down the hall. There was a bin halfway there, and Charlie tossed Clayton’s synth on the way past. It was always too sweet when Clayton made it. A nurse looked up from behind the desk, a frown squirrelling perfect red brows together.

‘Lieutenant Matheson...’

‘I just need a couple of minutes,’ Charlie said. She tried for a smile, hoping it looked apologetic enough. ‘Not a big fan of hospitals.’

The nurse’s eyes flicked down to the screen. From the way her mouth softened and the corners of her eyes tightened, she was looking at Charlie’s records. If that mess of procedures and excisions wasn’t enough to instil a bit of sympathy, the woman probably shouldn’t be a medical professional. Charlie waited, biting her lip.

‘Well, if you’re quick,’ the nurse said. She tugged a drawer open and grabbed a wristband, scanning it over the computer to activate it. ‘Here. This will stop the med-hive from deactivating when you leave the building. I’ll be able to call you once the doctor is ready too.’

Charlie grabbed it with a quick ‘thanks’, and hurried on out the door before anyone changed their mind. It was getting light. There was a doctor sneaking a cigarette behind his cupped hand next to the door. He traded nods with Charlie and went on smoking. She walked down to the patrol car and let herself into the passenger seat. 

Later - when she had two hands again - she’d argue with Monroe about who got to drive. She rubbed her hand against her leg and he flicked the heater on, warm air hitting her fingers.

‘You didn’t have to wait.’

He looked at her, eyebrows lifting. ‘What else am I going to go? Go and play strip poker with the DNMs? Remind Clayton my creepy landlord has gone awol and blown up my bedsit on the way out?’

‘Baker wasn’t creepy,’ Charlie said.

‘He whistled. At night,’ Monroe said. ‘In the dark.’

The jibe creaked a laugh out of her. She leaned back into the seat, tucking her feet up against the dashboard. The position made her ribs ache, a dull weight like someone was sitting on them. 

‘Clayton’s closed the Walls. She’s searching the City for the suspects.’

Monroe tapped the side of his head. ‘I got the order. Didn’t sound like fun.’

‘Sitting out here did?’

‘The company is better,’ he said, mouth twitching into a wry smile. Charlie’s attention caught on the cupid’s bow of his upper lips, remembering the the firm heat of it against her mouth. She wondered what it’d be like to kiss him again. She knew that was a bad idea.

‘She thinks we screwed up their plan.’

‘You don’t?’

‘No. Yes.’ Charlie stopped and rubbed her shoulder. It had already been sore from the bar fight, now the cramped muscles felt raw under the skin. She tongued the raw spots on her cheek, tasting copper. ‘We spoiled something, but I don’t think it was by closing the Walls before they could get out.’

‘It can’t have helped.’

Charlie shook her head. 'These guys have waltzed in and out through our defences like they had a  key.'  Or the two men who had been behind every security protocol and hive safeguard that the City had. 'They broke into the Tower, they got into the Hive and out with most of their skin still on their bones. No way their plan was run for the gates and hope no-one closes them.'

A shrug shifted the breadth of Monroe's shoulders. 'Sometimes a simple plan is the best.'

She flipped her fingers impatiently. 'Fine, but it isn't going to be their  only play. Closing the Walls is, at best, an inconvenience. Losing  you  is what stalled them. They went to a lot of trouble to get you, Monroe. Why?’

‘My charm and good looks aren’t enough?’ 

Charlie snorted her opinion of the that and shifted in her seat, staring at Monroe. He raised his eyebrows at her. ‘Got something in my teeth?’ he asked.

‘Funny,’ Charlie said dryly. She narrowed her eyes and poked at the idea. ‘What if it’s not about...you? Not  you  you.’

‘Is there a non-me me?’

‘Not anymore.’ Charlie said. ‘Not since your series got put on ice. What if its not  you,  but just one the MNR series they need?’

He shrugged. ‘Unlikely, Charlie. I’m a relic. The DNM series might be a creepy antfarm of a thing, but their tech makes me look like...well, a toaster.’

‘I’d rather have you at my back then them,’ Charlie said, leaning over to bump her shoulder against his. ‘A DNM series would have obeyed protocol on the road, obeyed me at the Bakery, and I’d be dead.’

He smirked. ‘Maybe my template was Batman?’ 

Charlie started to snort at him and then stopped. ‘Maybe.’

‘I don’t think Batman was real-’

‘No, but your template  was.  Duncan knew him, remember. Maybe he knew something that’s still locked up in there.’ She poked a finger against his forehead. ‘Behind those firewalls. Or hell, you do. Something that the suspects need.’

Monroe took her hand and pulled it down to his chest, flattening her fingers against where his heart would be. ‘Most of my memory banks are cached here, Charlie. All the important things, kept safe and sound.’

She needed to say something. Push him away...pull him close? Or just remember he wasn’t even really a him.

‘Don’t.’

‘Okay.’

‘No. It’s not,’ she sighed. ‘But this isn't.... I need to get my arm sorted and you need to get out of the way.’

‘Good thing I have circuits instead of a heart, Charlie,’ Monroe said. ‘Otherwise that would sting.’

Charlie rolled her eyes at him and grabbed his hand, pressing her fingertips against his. ‘Copy my biokey. Go to my apartment and stay there.’

He grinned, his eyes crinkling in deep lines that made her think his template - whoever they had been - had been someone happy. ‘You asking me up to look at your etchings, Charlie?’

‘You’re a target. You’re not just a target, you’re our only clue. I should tell Clayton and have you crated for your own protection. Since we can’t do that, you need to go to ground. Hopefully they won’t think to look for you there.’

Light flickered under his skin as the nanites mapped her microbes and skin. Once the key was logged he sat back, worry creasing his eyebrows. ‘Charlie-’

The sting-flash of the hospital bracelet interrupted whatever he was going to say. Charlie didn’t know what she should feel about that, what she  did  feel was mostly relieved. There was nothing wrong with avoidance. She nudged the car door open.

‘Stay out of trouble,’ she said, then hesitated half in and half out of the car. ‘Monroe, what happened in the Bakery...’

‘I don’t remember anything,’ he said. 

‘I do,’ Charlie said. ‘You’re a good partner.’

‘For a toaster.’

‘For anyone.’

The bracelet stung her again and she took the excuse to scramble out of the car and slam the door. It was definitely morning now. Nurses and doctors hurried in and out of the building, trading shifts. Habit made Charlie pick out the bots - the neat, curly-haired Grace model, the Pris that was only flesh from the chest bone up - and new fear made her search their faces for beetle black, glass shiny eyes.

None of them seemed to be interlopers. Not that it meant anything, they could be reprogrammed or just a better refit. Charlie ignored the pinch of paranoia and headed back inside, swiping her bracelet up the side of the door to let her in.

The doctor was waiting for her, eyes swimming blue and wet with the nanite-interface. Charlie’s new arm lay on the side, flayed synth-skin peeled back from the wet, metal bones of it. 

‘I hope you’re more careful with this one,’ he joked.

Charlie gave him a flatly unamused look as a Grace cut her out of her binding and t-shirt, gripping her spasming arm in tight, brown fingers. As the Grace helped her up onto the table - the metal cold against her hips - it occured her to wonder if there been  a  Grace to start with. A template like Monroe’s. How many of her secrets were locked up in the bots head where no-one could get at them?

There was no way to ask now.

She lay down, the cold metal against her shoulder-blades making her hiss, and gritted her teeth as her arm was stretched out to the side.

‘Let’s get this off,’ the doctor said, not bothering with affable anymore. ‘We’ll see what sort of mess you’ve made of it.’

That seemed harsh.


	17. Chapter 17

Cold metal cuffed Charlie’s arm to the table. The arm. She supposed it was a bit late to get attached to it now that it was about to get junked. Old arm to the left; new arm to the right. Charlie rolled her head to the side and stared at it. It hadn’t been mapped to her body yet, so it was just long rods and bulbous joints. Insectile.

The doctor boosted himself up onto the table with a grunt and braced his knee against her shoulder. At some point during the night, the contact points had fused. They had to amputate it again.

Charlie closed her eyes and clenched her teeth until the hinges of her jaw creaked in protest. The nerve block meant she was feeling no pain, but the high, juddering whine of the saw vibrated through her body, making her twitch and squirm under her skin. She could smell it too, the sour metal stink of hot solder and the BBQ hint of charred skin where the red-hot metal-dust landed on her.

Her Dad. 

If she was right, if he was alive, what would he think of her? His rebellion had been because he didn’t approve of the bots - about something to do with the bots, one of the things they never talked about when she was in the room - and now his daughter was one. As good as. Add up all the bits and pieces - the arm, a kidney, pins and staples, and her Hive - and she was what, 75% human now? Less.

The doctor grunted in satisfaction and shifted his weight off her shoulder. ‘There,’ he said. Charlie felt the pressure of his hand against her shoulder, an idea of the warmth of it, but she couldn’t feel it. She opened her eyes and blinked at the ragged cuff of arm still attached to her. ‘That’s the worst of it, now.’

She laughed, a cracked noise. ‘I’ve done this before,’ she reminded him. ‘I know you’re lying.’

He braced his arm against the table and leaned over her, his shadow falling over her chest and face. The smell of sweat and stimulants overpowered the stink of mental. ‘It won't be as bad as the first time, Charlie. Your body has already accepted the implants and integrated the hive. Trust me, we will have you up and on your feet in no time.'

It was a professionally reassuring smile, all white teeth and carefully measured angles. Charlie distrusted it on principle, but he was the only doctor she had. 

'Ok, you're the expert,' she said. It was a lie - Rachel was the expert, the doctor was just a skilled labourer - but he seemed to appreciate it. 'Let's get me armed again.'

He chuckled, gave her another meds-muffled, approving pat and got back to work. The quiet, attentive Grace handed him the heavy-duty drill, vicious looking auger bit already screwed into place. He hefted it in both hands, fingers working to find a secure grip, and glanced at her for one last nod of approval.

Charlie took a breath so deep that it hurt her ribs and blew it out. It didn’t matter if she was only 75% human, it didn’t matter if she was 75% tech. As long as she was a cop, as long as she could find her Dad.

‘Go.’

The auger bit into her arm, bone smoking as it was ground away. It didn't hurt, but she knew it should have. Charlie panted raggedly, tasting the dust of her own marrow on her tongue, and her eyes stung with sweat. She tried to focus on something under the fact that the doctor was coring her arm - anything.

The suspects had incapacitated Monroe and her in the Bakery. They could have taken him then, just strap him to Baker’s crate and drag both out through whatever rathole they’d used. Except they hadn’t. Why not.

She focused on the memory of cool dimness and the chilly drip of defrosting vats. Baker was crated, an object to hauled rather than a hostage to manage, and Monroe had been disabled by the EMP. It made no sense to leave him for the not-Danny’s to grab. Even if Charlie hadn’t interrupted, there were lots of ways that plan could have gone south. An accident on the roads, some other nosy MMPD cop, or even a flat tire and Monroe was gone or damaged.

Safest to take him then. So why hadn’t they?

Charlie worried at that as the Doctor pulled the interface out of her bones - the nerve-filaments tickle/itched as they slid through her flesh - and let it drop to the ground. The only reason they hadn’t taken Monroe was because they couldn’t.  
It they could take Baker....

Shit. Charlie tried to sit up. In her head she did sit up, her thighs up to her hipbones did their part of the job, the muscles in her ass tightened. It just fell apart somewhere around her stomach, and she just twitched instead.

It was enough to make the Doctor pause and frown. ‘Charlie, you have to stay completely still. You know that. If the interface doesn’t take...’

He trailed off, leaving the warning - you’ll lose more bone, acquire more nerve damage, eventually we’ll need to take more of the arm - hanging. 

‘I need to talk to Captain Clayton,’ Charlie said. She tried to push herself up her elbow, mind straining at the image of her body moving. Nothing. Not even a twitch. Damn it! ‘It’s important.’

‘It can wait,’ the doctor told her. ‘Now. Still, Ms Matheson.'

Charlie hissed her breath out in irritation, dropping her head back against the table with a thunk. Restlessness pricked at the parts of her body she could still control, making her want to fidget and tap.

The only reason not to grab Monroe when they could is that they couldn’t. They couldn’t, for the same reason they had to transport Baker in a crate instead of making him walk on his own two feet. They’d gone underground, down into the infested tunnels where the wild hives still swarmed.

Crated and in stasis, Baker would have passed un-noticed and the suspects must have had a helluva lot of confidence their tech would protect them. More and more, in Charlie’s head, ‘suspects’ was a thin mask for ‘Miles’. She didn’t know anyone else who’d be that much of a-

Pain sliced thin as wire through her. 'Son of a bitch,' she swore, gagging on the words as they tried to turn into a scream.  
'Nearly there,' the doctor assured her, cheerful as only someone not blind with pain could be, as he slotted the new interface into the raw end of bone and marrow.

Charlie swore at him again, just for the satisfaction of it. She was sweating, a sickly film of it sticking to her like grease, and maybe she'd needed this reminder. Miles was her family, and she was a Matheson even before she was a cop...but he'd done this to her.

While she panted through the reestablishment of the bio-link, the doctor lifted the arm out of its padded cradle. He held it as if it might bite. There were sharp edges, but Charlie thought he was more worried about the cost. She'd looked it up last time. The arm - her arm - was worth so much it basically wasn't worth anything. Nobody could really afford Rachel's tech these days, it arrived borne on her good graces. Or her guilt, in Charlie's case.

He introduced it to the new interface, connections snapping into place with a series of clicks that flicked behind Charlie's eyes. They felt like pennies against the inside of her skull.

Cool fingers pinched a bubble of skin on Charlie's neck, the Grace injecting the counter to the nerve block with unsympathetic efficiency. After last time, Charlie knew what to expect. Or she thought she did. 

It felt like...everything. Like burning and being frozen, like paper cuts and bruises, like pleasure that went too far into pain. The most efficient way for the interface to map her body accurately was by firing off every nerve in her body all at once. It was just a random blast off sensation that her body had to translate on the hop.

Charlie rolled off the table and landed on the floor, cracking her shoulder and elbow on the concrete. She twisted herself into a ball, pressing her face into the crook of her arm and digging her - her own - fingers into her hair. Her heart hammered in confused panic against her ribs, not believing her brain that they knew what was going on. 

The doctor was saying something. Charlie ignored him. A web of extruded mono-fibre and nano-wire wrapped itself around the bare bones of the new arm, building musculature and tendons to fit her body mass and level of fitness. Little metal caps popped into place along her knuckles, tendons test-drove her fingers through a series of exercise.

Done.

The pain receded to this odd ache in the stem of Charlie's brain. Not an injury so much as an affront, the shock that so much pain hadn't been real. She rolled onto her back and thought about staying there.

The Grace helped her up instead, steadying her as the doctor rolled out the arm's skin like an old sock. The synth was flat white, stretching like elastic over his finger, and Charlie thought she'd prefer the raw metal of her unadorned arm.

Unfortunately all the hive 'nerve-endings' were in the skin. She held her arm out, watching it get skinned in reverse. It made her think of Danny, his face roughly stapled over someone else's. Had that been Miles too? Or had her Dad come up with that idea? Why not. After all, at some point him and Rachel had enough in common to get married. 

'Are you in pain?' The Grace asked. Her voice was almost interested.

'Shit,' Charlie muttered. She was crying, Tears were dripping down her cheeks, weak, dribbly reactions to the slap of adrenaline and hormones. She rubbed her hands roughly over her face, wiping salt up into her hair. A hard sniff filled the back of her throat with snot and seawater. 'I'm fine. Just reaction. We done?'

'Just need to make sure everything hooked up right,' the doctor said. 'Can you make a fist? Wave? Three fingers?'  
Charlie ran through the battery of tests impatiently, flicking the doctor the finger at the end. He tutted in disapproval, but signed her out anyhow. She thanked him ungraciously and dragged her t-shirt back on, yanking her hair impatiently out of the collar. 

Without the bracelet, the med-hive went dead the minute Charlie left the hospital. The hum of the city dropped back into her head, reassuring in an odd sort of way. That was when she should have called Clayton. Instead she headed down to the street to grab a cab, heading home.


	18. Chapter 18

 

Clayton had closed the Walls to stop the kidnappers leaving. Neville was taking advantage of the confinement to spot check citizenship. His enforcement squad - MMPD officers set apart with red collars and a security-slaved hive - clustered at the metro stops and exits from the underground. Indigents, rousted from squats and the sprawling tent-streets that sprung up night, huddled inside glittering mono-fibre cordons, children crying and sucking sliced fingers.

It always took kids ages to learn that a bit of light could hurt.

Watching from her cab, Charlie saw a skinny, squinting man waving a piece of paper at one of the officer. His bond, probably. Under the law, citizens could - for an annual fee - sponsor outsiders through the wall if they had an essential skill or were related by blood or marriage. Under the law, bonded outsiders could petition for citizenship after a set period of time and evidence they were contributing members of society. Under the law, it was all quite fair.

In reality, wall-wolves counterfeited bonds by the van load for the desperate and dispossessed, smuggling them into the city to work off their debt until they died or got caught. Or some manufacturer would fill his factory with tech workers on the promise of a work-bond, only to let it lapse after the first month.

This time the bond must have been genuine, because the enforcer waved the skinny man on - unfortunately it didn’t include the woman and child who’d been with them. Traffic shifted and Charlie’s cab pulled forward before she could see what happened. Not that she needed to.

She leaned forwards, backside sliding on the tape-patched plastic. ‘Take Clarke up ahead, and just drop me off? My street is gonna be back-logged.’

The cabby used the mirror to glance back at her, eyes bloodshot and reassuringly human. For some reason, no-one made bots with stys.

‘Sorry, Lieutenant,’ he said, tapping a blunt finger against his comm-unit. It left a smudge on the plastic. ‘Orders from MMPD. I don’t get paid unless I deliver you to destination.’

‘I won’t tell if you don’t.’

The cabby snorted and hit the comm again. ‘Nice idea, except your lot tracks the keys.’

Charlie heaved a sigh of surrender and leaned back, frowning out at the nervous streets. Even the citizens were twitchy, eager to get themselves and their indiscretions off the streets. Neville’s pet cause was bond-abuse, but if he turned up parole lapses, warrants or illegal hive-hooks… They’d pad his arrest record just as well.

The pressure registered with the interface before her brain caught up with the nervous scrubbing of her thumb. It - her arm - felt heavy and alien against her side. Stupid notion, it was the same arm, right down to the faint grid-shaped scar on her wrist bone. Just the way her brain remembered it. It just felt...new, awkward.

It didn’t matter. She flexed her fingers, tapping out a tune in the air. The thing worked. She could function.

The cabby dropped her off outside her building, wishing her a good day as she scrambled out the door. 

Considering the morning so far, Charlie thought that it was too late for that. Not the driver’s fault though, she dragged up a nod, a smile and closed the door. The tents that usually lined the street had dried up like fungi in the sun, leaving behind the detritus of a flit. Torn blankets, a dented mug, discarded knives and broken plastic forms, a stained, legless doll.

Part of Charlie was indignant. She remembered, not  well but she remembered, being a child who had to leave behind treasures to hold her brother’s hand. It still bothered her, but there wasn’t enough room in the City for everyone and there wasn’t enough  her  for all these fights.

She dragged herself up the worn stairs, feet scuffing over the shiny, plascrete mended cracks in the stone. It had been over 24 hours since she’d slept, they hadn’t been quiet, and she was starting to wish she’d drunk Clayton’s syn-brew. 

The light on her keypad was flickering blue when she got to her flat, alerting her that a guest key had been used. She leaned her hand against it, waiting for it to click open, and stepped into her flat.

It smelled like food. Actual, warmed up, identifiable at source food. 

‘You cook?’ she asked.

‘I warm,’ Monroe said. ‘Admittedly, based on your cupboards, that’s probably pretty magical to you. Sit down.’

‘I need syn-brew and a shower,’ Charlie demurred. She rubbed her hand over her face, fingertips dragging her eyelid and the corner of her mouth down. ‘And I need you to get me a map of what’s under Philly.’

Monroe blocked her as she stumbled to the bathroom, redirecting her into a chair. ‘It’s a sandwich. Eat it.’

It was toasted and crispy, cheese spilling out of the crust. Charlie pried the top layer up, strings of hot cheese stretching, and poked at the pink meat inside. ‘I’m not hungry.’

‘I don’t care.’ He dragged the kitchen’s other chair out, spinning it around so he could straddle it. ‘Eat it. You want a map of the metro?’

He cupped his hands around the edges of the table, turning it into a canvas for a light sketch of tunnels and collapsed stairways. 

Charlie took a bite out of the corner of the sandwich. It sat in her mouth like plastic, sticky and scratchy as she chewed grimly at it. Good faith effort made, she swallowed and shoved the plate aside. The column of St Peter’s Basilica buttressed the edges of the plate.

‘No,’ she said, waving her fingers over the empty areas of the table. ‘Everything. Rail stations, storage, sewers...anything under street level. I want to see it.’

The image rolled as Monroe reached over and tapped the plate back in front of her. ‘That’ll take me as long as takes you to eat that sandwich.’

Charlie snorted. ‘You’re a cop, not my nursemaid, remember.’ 

He flashed a grin, eyes crinkling. ‘I can’t believe you’re missing a chance to call me a toaster, Charlie.’

Oh. Charlie blinked at him and then down at the now slightly soggy toastie on the plate. She poked it again and laughed. ‘Jeez, Monroe, what did you do? Sit on it.’

He raised his eyebrows and pulled a thoughtful face. ‘Really the worst thing you could think of me doing?’

Charlie wrinkled her nose at him. ‘Now I’m  definitely  not hungry.’

‘Technically the blueprints are historical records,’ Monroe reminded her. ‘I should make you go through Clayton before I access them.’

He waited. Charlie glowered at him for a second, feeling stubborn. Except it was a stupid fight to win, so she grabbed the sandwich and took an ostentatious bite. A faintly pleased expression tucked the corners of Monroe’s mouth and he went back to work. Bubbles of space and new tunnels expanded under the city.

After the second bite, Charlie’s stomach caught up with the idea that maybe it was hungry. She finished the sandwich, licking crumbs off her fingers, and got up from the table to grab an energy bar from the drawer. Stripping the wrapper off she crammed it in her mouth in two bites, the hit of glucose and peanut butter greasiness thick on her tongue.

‘Do I have time for a shower?’

‘Remember when I was able to use my enhanced senses to detect whether you’d had a panic attack or not?’ Monroe asked. He glanced up briefly at her. ‘Go wash.’

She snorted at him and headed into the narrow bathroom. Usually she’d have stripped on her way through the bedroom, shedding clothes like she was leaving a trail for someone to follow. The thought of someone seeing her naked though - all the scars and divots and scrapes stripped off her kevlar - made her feel like her nerves were being fired again.

Except that wasn’t entirely the truth was it? Charlie nudged the door to her bathroom shut and stripped with impatient efficiency, dumping her sweaty uniform on the bare, white tiles. It had taken her a while, but she’d gotten used to showering at work. People could look or not, fuck’em.

It was Monroe she didn’t want seeing her naked. Not like this.

Someone had taken the mirror out of the bathroom before Charlie had moved in. She assumed it had been Rachel. The glass partition of the shower was the only reflection she had. It was enough.

Too thin. Too scarred up. Charlie reached across her body to her shoulder and fumbled at the silver node connections that released her arm. It dropped free and she propped it up across the sink. Too incomplete.

It was her though. That was a surprise. Her brain wasn’t ghosting her lost arm back on anymore. Apparently seeing it cut off this time had helped it sink in.

‘Charlie?’ Monroe asked, voice distant. ‘You alright?’

‘Yeah,’ she said, rubbing at her stump. Her fingers slid in the antibacterial gel. ‘Just… Yeah.’

She stepped into the cubicle and flicked the shower on, closing her eyes as the stream of hard water hit her. It wasn’t water, of course, just fast drying gel and fruit acids. Spray it on and scrape it off. It got you clean, but never left you  squeaky  clean. On the other other hand there was never any temptation to spend hours soaking.

Charlie ducked her chin, scrubbed the gel down through her hair to her scalp. Once she finished she stepped back, the spray cutting off immediately. She was dry almost as quickly. Leaving her, she realised, naked and trapped in her own bathroom. 

Shit.

She stood there for a second, paralysed with stupidity and fear. Then she glanced at her battered reflection and...fuck it. It wasn’t going to get any better was it? She turned and stalked out into her bedroom, forcing a strut that was meant to be cocky  and  casual. 

‘Finished?’ She asked, grabbing a t-shirt from the bed and yanking it on. One-handed, she fumbled and nearly got her head stuck in an arm hole. It took a frustrating couple of non-cocky seconds before she was able to untangle herself and pull the hem down to her thighs. ‘How’s it look.’

‘Beautiful.’

She spun around to stare at him, expecting him to be looking at the table or her security system or…anything but her. Except he was, all solemn expression and oddly sad eyes. Heat flushed up from Charlie’s stomach to her throat, making it hard to swallow.

‘Why did you kiss me?’ she asked.

His mouth tightened like something had hurt him and he shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. Charlie felt a thump in her chest and didn’t know if it was disappointment or not. She’d been expecting something more flowery, expecting not to believe it. Monroe got up from the table and walked over to her. ‘When Baker woke me up, I wanted to take care of you. To be a good partner. To prove that they were wrong about me being dangerous, that I wasn’t something to keep in a cage. It was about me. Then it wasn’t. Even a machine can want something, I guess.’

He brushed his knuckle along her cheek, as careful as if she might break.  


This time, it was Charlie who kissed him.


	19. Chapter 19

 

It should have been weird. Maybe Charlie had hoped it would be weird, that they would both shuffle their feet, agree it had been worth a try and get back to work. It wasn't weird, or if it was Charlie didn't care. 

She stretched up onto her tiptoes, twisting her fingers in his hair to pull him down. Her mouth moved hungrily against his, exploring the shape of his lips and the line of his teeth. When he kissed her back, teeth catching her lower lip in a rough bite, pleasure pinched at her nerve endings.

His hands brushed her sides gently, finding the dip of her waist and the curve of her breast. Charlie had seen him fold metal in his fingers, but he touched her like she was made of china. It bugged her that she liked that. She’d spent her whole life shoving at people’s assumptions about her: because she was a girl, because she was pretty, because she was her mother’s daughter. 

Except it tugged loose some sick knot in her gut she’d not even known was there, because if he touched her like she was breakable it meant she wasn’t already broken. Or, at least, that he didn’t see it.

A hand touched her thigh, just under the dangling hem of her t-shirt, and waited. Charlie made a low, encouraging sound in her throat and squirmed against him. He felt human there, the hard lift of his cock pressing against her hip. For a second her brain stuttered over the reminder that he  felt human, but  wasn’t  human. Then Monroe bunched her t-shirt up to her waist, big, callused hands sliding up the backs of her thighs to cup her ass, and she didn’t care.

Heat flushed through her, and she  felt wetness slide on her thighs as she pressed them together.

She dragged her mouth away from his and kissed his jaw, stubble prickling her lips and throat. A soft bite caught on the hard line of his collarbone, soft skin denting under her teeth, and Monroe’s hands flexed hard around her backside. The combination - the slip of control, the razor edge of pleasure/pain, the stuttering revival of her sex drive - made her whole body cramp with urgent, aching hunger.

‘You liked that,’ Monroe said. He sounded pleased, but unphased. Charlie wasn’t sure she could get all her words out of her brain right now, but he wasn’t even out of breath. ‘You should tell your doctors that your physiological responses don’t seem delayed at all.’

Charlie snorted. ‘Not telling  them  anything I don’t have to,’ she muttered. Lifting her head from his throat she leaned back, trusting him to keep her steady. ‘Monroe...do you? I mean, is this, for you too? Does it feel...do you feel…?’

She trailed off, groping for words in the sticky haze of lust and embarrassment that filled her brain. Monroe shifted his weight and tugged her into the v of his thighs, the ridge of his cock nudging insistently against her stomach. Hunger pulsed hot and wet between Charlie’s thighs.

‘Does that answer your question?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ Charlie gasped, then groaned and shook her head. ‘No. I mean, do you like me touching you? Or is it-’

He dipped his head down and kissed the doubts off her lips. His hands slid up from her ass, t-shirt folding over his forearms, to her ribs. ‘I don’t know if my reactions are the same as a humans,’ he said. ‘There is feedback, there is reaction. I want you to touch me; I want to touch you. Is that enough?’

Charlie loosed her fingers from his hair and stroked his face, tracing the uncompromising slant of his cheekbone. He turned into the gesture and kissed her palm, lips warm and dry.

‘I don’t know,’ she admitted, voice shaking. ‘I don’t want to take advantage of you. I don’t want-’

She didn’t want to be her mother, programming things to pretend to care about her.

Sharp, white teeth dug into the heel of her hand. She knew the bite was carefully calibrated, that Monroe knew exactly the pressure he exerted. It still made Charlie’s breath skip in her chest.

‘Stop talking, Charlie,’ he told her, turning the bite into a kiss that followed the tendons in her hand down into her wrist. His lips lingered at her pulse. ‘Do you know how satisfying it is to feel your heart-beat increase when I do this? I can measure your arousal precisely by the blood engorging your external genitalia.’

Charlie felt her cheeks get hot. ‘That’s not hot.’

She felt Monroe’s lips stretch into a smile against her forearm. ‘Liar.’

OK, maybe. Her body was so tight, it was uncomfortable.

Charlie took a deep breath and a step back. He let her retreat, not looking up as her hand slipped from his face. Then she hooked her fingers in his sleeve and dragged him along with her, both of them falling back onto the bed.

He caught himself, bracing his arms on either side of her. Charlie started to reach up, wrapping her arms around his neck. Only one arm came up, the other was a scarred stump sticking out of a t-shirt arm-hole.

It felt like she was punctured, a cold needle jabbed through the balloon of her confidence. She went still, holding her breath. ‘I can get my-’

‘If you want to,’ Monroe said. ‘Not for me.’ He paused and his mouth quirked. ‘If I wanted a robot arm hand job, I have my own.’

It made her laugh, all breathless and salty in the back of her tongue, and she reached down between their bodies to grab his belt. She yanked him down - although she knew he was still holding most of his weight off her - and kissed him again. 

After the first long, sweet kiss, Monroe rolled over onto his back. The movement left Charlie sprawled over his chest. ‘Easier for you,’ he said.

Charlie tugged his shirt open, fumbling one-handed, and kissed the pale span of muscle. Monroe let his hands roam over her body, exploring the cup of her backside and the bumpy curve of her ribs. His hands were always in the right places, moving away from anywhere that made her tense and never drifting back. 

It wasn’t...She didn’t know. It felt good, it felt selfish. She didn’t know how to  explain  that - ‘Be thoughtful, but don’t think about it’. Charlie shoved her doubts down into the back of her head - she’d not told  him to do this, he wanted this too - and then forgot them entirely as his hand slid between her thighs.

Clever fingers, touching her just  there.  Oh god, yes. She pushed against his hand, biting her lip hard as he traced the slick, wetness of her sex. A rough finger skimmed the taut bump of her clit, sending shivers through her, and her comm-unit screeched from the bathroom.

‘Shit!’ Charlie yelped. She rolled off the bed and scrambled into the bathroom, grabbing her arm off the sink. Hard-wiring her comm in had seemed like a good idea at the time. She slotted the arm on, habit flexing her fingers as the interface kicked in. The shrill ring shifted from audible to a hard, thrum against her jawbone. The information on the caller unscrolled in her mind: Captain Nora Clayton, third call, alert status. ‘Shit. It’s the Captain.’

She turned around to look at Monroe, the usual crappy work excuses on the tip of her tongue. He was already sitting up, one hand shoved through his curls. ‘Later,’ he said. Then paused, looking at her curiously. ‘Later?’

The grin felt actually happy, light. Not like she was trying to lift weights with the corners of her mouth. ‘Yeah. Later.’

She gave the mental command to connect the call and Clayton’s voice dropped into her ear, mid-yell at someone else. 

‘...maintain the lockdown. They attacked us in our home, they took our people. They aren’t getting out of the City, I don’t  care  what Neville wants. Understand?’ There was a muttered response and then a frustrated sigh from Clayton, before she shifted her attention back to the call. ‘Matheson?’

‘Sir.’

‘I take it you heard we’ve not found Baker or his kidnappers?’ 

‘I did,’ Charlie said. She ducked back out into her main room - Monroe back at his kitchen table map - and scrambled into a spare uniform. ‘Do you need me to come in?’

There was a pause and a hard exhale on the other end of the connection. It was the sort of sigh that meant someone was going to be unhappy any minute now. Charlie sat down on the edge of the bed and yanked her boots on, tugging the laces snug. 

‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘You’re being put on medical leave, Matheson,’ Clayton said. ‘Full pay.’

‘...I’m fine,’ Charlie said. ‘They just switched my arm out like a flat tyre. I don’t need-’

‘It’s not open for discussion. The decision has been made,’ Clayton said. There was a pause, the soundscape backing the call shifting. When Clayton broke the silence, her voice was carefully bland. ‘Commissioner Neville was concerned about the emotional trauma of the last few weeks. He was... very... worried about your well being.’

Neville. Jason  had  warned her. 

After a second, Charlie said, ‘That’s very charitable of him.’

Clayton snorted. ‘Yeah, that’s one way to put it.’

The need to prove herself - that she wasn’t involved, that she wasn’t compromised morally  or  physically - scratched inside Charlie’s chest. She swallowed it down and stood up, walking over to stare down at Monroe’s map. It galled her to give Neville a win, at all, but it would be easier to do this if she didn’t have to answer to Clayton.

‘I understand, Captain,’ she said. ‘Thanks for letting me know.’

‘Matheson. Charlie,’ Clayton said, sounding suspicious. ‘Don’t do anything stupid.’

‘I’m not Miles,’ Charlie said dryly. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll get some sleep and fight with him tomorrow. You’ll probably have Baker back by then.’

‘Hope so,’ Nora said. ‘I have to go. Charlie...’

‘Nothing stupid,’ Charlie said. ‘I promise.’

The call went dead. Charlie rubbed the back of her ear absently and glanced at Monroe. It seemed like she should say something, acknowledge the happy tingle of lust in her breasts and between her legs.

‘I need to do this,’ she said instead, putting her hand on the table. ‘If my Dad’s alive, if Miles left me to die. I need to know why?’

He nodded. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘What do you need.’

Charlie looked down at the map, her hair falling in a heavy, wavy curtain over her face. ‘Where’s the Bakery?’

A blip pulsed on the map. Just over one of the long tunnels of the sewer. Charlie chewed the edge of her tongue, staring at the underground maze. She’d not really thought about what came out of her mouth next, but it just dropped into place like a jigsaw piece.

‘Can you get from there to my mom’s house using the tunnels?’ she asked.


	20. Chapter 20

15 years ago, the Matheson house had been a public building - a museum, Rachel had kept some of the art - in the middle of the a thriving city. 10 years ago it had been the capital of the City, always full of people and bustle. Now it was a silent manor house in the middle of a smooth plain of nano-tended grass, with windows tinted black in mourning.

Charlie stopped opposite the house, squinting over the killing ground lawn. She’d grown up here. There’d been a house before that - neat and suburban, the sort of house that had a trike in the yard and a swing-set - but Charlie only remembered that from pictures. This had been the only home she’d really felt was  home.  It looked cold now, but it hadn’t been then. Whatever problems she and Rachel had, it had never mattered when they had Danny to take care off. That he was important was one thing they’d always agreed on.

‘It looks quiet,’ Monroe said. He called up the security schematic, scrolling code and compressed information flickering too fast for the human eye to follow. ‘All the IC protocols are in place, firewalls intact, no sign of illicit penetration or subversion. Are you sure the suspects would come  here?’

Raking her fingers through her hair, Charlie pulled it back from her face and tied the heavy mass in a loose knot at the back of her skull. Her mouth tasted like syn-brew, and not enough of it. She checked her pockets, fumbling through the clutter of receipts and change that had accumulated in there. If felt... wrong. Her uniform pockets were never messy, but thanks to Neville she wasn’t an officer today was she? So she was here in her jeans and her old, battered (hadn’t it been Miles first? it was big enough) leather jacket. She glanced at Monroe - who didn’t have civvie clothes but had left off his badge.

‘Rachel and I don’t...it’s never easy, but she’d have come to the hospital. When I was in a coma she came to see me. She’d have been there this time too,’ she said. A rough laugh scraped out of her. ‘She’d have come, if only to tell me to get a job that didn’t involve getting my arm blown off.’

Her fingers closed around the plastic vial. She pulled it out and flicked the cap off with her thumb, tapping two small, beige tabs into her palm. Monroe wasn’t human. He didn’t have any of the tics or habits or involuntary ‘tchs’. She could still feel his attention on her.

‘They’re approved.’

‘For exigent circumstances.’

Charlie cocked an eyebrow at him, ‘What else would you call this?’

She licked the pills off her hand, powder coating her tongue and sucking up the moisture. They caught on the back of her tongue, filling her mouth with that bitterly sharp chemical taste. She swallowed hard, rolling her tongue around the inside of her mouth, and waited for the brutal kick of adrenaline to hit her system. It kicked her heart into high gear, flushed the fatigue out of her muscles with a pulse of blood, and left her mouth sticky-dry. 

‘They won’t stop another panic attack, Charlie,’ Monroe said, quiet disapproval coating the edge of his voice.

Charlie wiped her hands on her thighs and took a deep breath in through her nose, feeling like electricity was popping in her nerve endings.. If it had been Clayton asking - judging - she’d have fronted the carefully not-accusation out with cockiness and a smirk. She’d learned a lot from Miles. It was Monroe though, and...it felt unfair not to be honest with him. There was no way he  couldn’t  be honest with her, after all.

‘I know that, I do, but if I’m right - if I’m right about  anything -  I’m going to need an edge going in,’ she said. ‘My ribs are held together with nano-bonds and hope, I’m beat up, I’m exhausted, and my arm  hurts.’

It wouldn’t be a lie to stop there. Charlie thought about it, but… ‘And Miles is better than me,’ she said flatly. It felt -  still  \- like a betrayal to admit her doubts aloud. ‘Better than me on a good day, Monroe. So I need whatever help I can get, and I just have to hope my brain doesn’t fuck up and that Miles  isn’t  having a good day. OK?’

Maybe it wasn’t. Charlie didn’t wait to find out, striding across the road to the lush, perfectly even boundary of the Matheson land. It felt like contained static, prickling energy just against your skin. She put her brand new hand up to the field, spreading her fingers.

‘Rachel,’ she said. ‘It’s Charlie. I need to talk to you.’

She felt the connection click open, her biokey cutting through the communication protocols straight to Rachel’s workstation. Instead of an answer, her mother’s cool voice dropped straight into Charlie’s implanted comm-unit.

‘I’m either not home or busy,’ she said briskly. There’d been three people who had a straight link to this line and two were gone. So that was the message Rachel had left for her only daughter. ‘Leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible….Leave a  message , Charlie.’

The corners of Charlie’s mouth twitched. Ok, maybe her mom did know her. Sometimes. The hive was waiting for an answer. 

‘It’s just me, Rachel,’ Charlie said easily. Playing to either an empty house or an antagonistic audience, sounded less strained than any real conversation Charlie had with Rachel in years. ‘I wanted to say thanks, for yesterday. At the hospital. So, thanks. Bye.’

She pulled her hand away from the static-prickle of the security barrier, but didn’t let go of the connection. It felt strange, her interface trying to translate a digital experience into something her brain could comprehend.  Dread. Pressure. Depths.  What stuck was the idea she’d jammed her arm into a clammy, wet mouth and was holding onto its tongue. 

Lovely.

Growing up a Matheson in the City had meant giving away a lot of personal freedoms. Growing up the normal kid of genius parents meant giving up even more. There hadn’t been a lot of opportunities to get away with anything. Between them though, Charlie and Danny had managed to find a few back doors to misbehavior.

Mostly they’d found an old book of their Dad’s, that had Rachel’s security override for the house written down in it. For the first time, it occurred to Charlie to wonder what he could have needed that for. Except there was no time to dwell on that. She used to need to be  at  Rachel’s work station to do this, but with the interface she just had to  send the sequence and…

‘Now, walk away,’ she told Monroe, turning on her heel and walking quickly down the road. It took a second before she heard his footsteps behind her. Then he was next to her, falling into perfect sync with her stride.

‘That’s it?’ he said. ‘Gotta say, was expecting something more dramatic. We had a whole storming the castle vibe going on, and then just knocked the door and left?’

Charlie glanced at him sidelong, her eyebrows lifting, and kept walking. There was a gnarled tree at the corner, the shadows of branches falling over her as she crossed under it. It didn’t do anything to block the Hive-observation, but the human eye  expected  it too. Charlie grabbed Monroe’s sleeve and yanked him across the property line.

She held her breath, her already amped up like a fist shoving at her chest, and waited for the screech and light a breached perimeter alert. Nothing. She exhaled, puffing out her cheeks, and then smiled tightly. ‘There you go. Better?’

A finger poked her shoulder. ‘You were  not  sure that would work.’

‘I was not,’ Charlie admitted. ‘But it did, and for the next ten minutes the house-hive won’t be able to see us.’

She thought he  might look impressed. ‘What about physical eyes on us?’

Charlie shrugged. ‘Nothing I can do about that, but...everyone trusts the hive. With any luck so do these guys.’

‘Luck,’ Monroe said. ‘That’s not real.’

‘Yeah, well,’ Charlie said, reaching round and pulling the gun from the back of her jeans. It was her service weapon, but fuck Neville. ‘You’re an android with dodgy programming, and I’m hopped on uppers. I’ll take what I can get.’

Monroe considered that for a breath, then flashed that wide, mad grin that looked so damn human. ‘Good point,’ He unholstered his weapon, hands curling around it with the ease of habit/programming, and nodded at the house. ‘Craziest takes point.’


	21. Chapter 21

 

Her biokey still worked. The door seals unlocked with a click, her breath misting on the pad, and Charlie nudged the door open with her shoulder, holding the gun down low against her thigh. Inside smelled like bleach and ozone, the low hum of industrial strength air-scrubbers hitting just on the threshold of the audible range. It was the only noise she could hear.

Monroe followed her in, light flickering under his skin as he scanned the area.

‘Clean,’ he said softly. ‘Extremely clean. Has the site been sterilised, or should your mother be on some sort of cleaning show?’

‘Sick kid, sensitive equipment,’ Charlie muttered back absently as she crossed the hall. Despite her best efforts, her footsteps sounded loud on the marble. ‘Rachel figured she might as well have lab conditions throughout.’

It was all glass, marble and steel in here. Uncomfortable chairs and a coffee bar, priceless works of gold and ink Japanese art plascrete frozen to the walls. Back when Rachel used to talk to people, this was where they’d meet. It didn’t look like anything in the room had moved since the last time Charlie was here, a year - no, she had to count the coma and make it two years - ago. If Charlie was right, of course, then the visitors they were looking for hadn’t come through the front door.

She went up the narrow metal staircase, Monroe at her heels. His weight made the thing creak, but there was no help for that. An exhalation opened the door at the top as well, into the family’s living area. It was...aggressively mid-west and suburban. You could hardly see the warm oak floors for the multi-coloured rugs, family photos hung in clusters on the walls and there were even coffee table books on the coffee table.

And Danny on the couch. 

Charlie’s heart twisted like a rag, actual pain filling her chest, and she let out her breath on a shaky sigh. It wasn’t one of the DNM bots, with their white plas-armour and gun belts - that filled the precinct and the house. She’d gotten used to them, the pain turning into something nagging and familiar to adapt to. Like a hangnail. It didn’t help now.

This was Danny, from the hair that needed cut to the grubby socks he had up on the couch while he napped. Even the clothes were right, the old, faded grey ‘I’m with Stupid’ shirt he’d got from Dad and never threw out.

Monroe touched her shoulder. ‘There are no signs of life in the room, Charlie. I don’t believe this model has even been hived’

Just a prop. Charlie worked her jaw from side to side, working the clenched tension out of the muscles and making the hinge click against her inner ear. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Rachel’s just crazy.’

And maybe in trouble. Charlie ignored her dead brother and got back to work, gesturing for Monroe to check one side of the house while she took the other. Kitchen, office, family rooms and bedrooms. All of them neat, clean and undisturbed. No sign of anyone, no sign of intruders.

She was just about to signal the all clear to Monroe, when she heard a man’s voice.

‘Just shut up and grab the food from the kitchen,’ he growled. ‘I need to piss.’

There was a click to his voice, something artificial under the human voice. It was weird. They could give Monroe a voice that no-one would question, but an augmented human always sounded that bit...off.

Whoever it was, they were heading towards Charlie. Keeping one eye on the end of the hall, she retreated back to Rachel’s old office and ducked inside. Closing the door over, she leaned against the wall and waited.

Two sets of footsteps. The first guy was still talking, but steadily. Even if you were ranting, habit mandated the occasional pause to look for assurance from the other person. This guy didn’t expect an answer.

Probably a low grade bot then. One of the old models that Baker had in storage, maybe. Charlie rested her head against the door, flexing her fingers to keep them relaxed, and waited.

One set of footsteps entered the kitchen, hitting tiles. The other would be heading for the bathroom at the end of the hall. Charlie shifted her weight carefully, leaning back from the door. Through the crack she saw a tall, heavily set man in black, fluid armour walk past.

‘Crap,’ she mouthed silently to herself. It couldn’t be some pencil-neck in a lab coat? 

The comm-unit in her jaw buzzed twice, the interface coming up with Monroe’s ID and location three metres away. Charlie gently eased the door open and risked a glance out, locating the sliver of Monroe’s silhouette at the end of the hall. She pointed at him and then the kitchen, holding up one finger. He acknowledged with a tip of his head and moved, long legs and speed covering the short distance in a breath. 

He disappeared into the kitchen and there was a dull series of thuds. The sound made the man spin around, coming face to muzzle with Charlie’s gun. She put her finger to her lips and hushed him.

‘On the ground,’ she said quietly.

The man hesitated, eyes flickering past her. She smiled at him tightly. ‘My partner’s already taking care of your backup,’ she said. ‘And that armour won’t catch a bullet through your eye. So get down, and do it slowly.’

He spread his hands and slowly went down to one knee. ‘Miss,’ he said. She’d been right about his jaw, she could see the scars where his face had been peeled back to insert synthetic bones. Old scars and, from the loose way his jaw moved, old tech. ‘There’s been some sort of confusion. I’m one of Ms Matheson’s new security detail.’

Charlie showed him her teeth in a humourless grin. ‘Nice try, but if you were? You’d know to call her Doctor. Now down.’

He stayed on one knee, still smiling. ‘I haven’t met Ms...Dr Matheson yet, that’s all. Look Ms...’

‘Down.’

His eyes flickered past Charlie’s shoulder to the wall and narrowed. ‘Matheson. You’re her  kid.’

The muscles in his bent leg clenched and Charlie cursed flatly, squeezing the trigger. The bullet caught him as he came up off the ground, punching through his eye and out the back of his head in a spray of blood. He flopped face down on the ground, blood pooling under his cheek. 

‘Shit,’ Charlie muttered. Her hands were sweating around the grip of her gun and her chest was tight. It never failed to shake her how easy to was to kill someone, and somehow it seemed worse here. Plus, some relic of six year old Charlie was fussing, Rachel was going to be furious about the blood on her nice, wooden floor.  ‘Shit .’

She shoved all the qualms aside for later and turned, jogging up the corridor to see if anyone else was coming. It was  possible  they hadn’t heard. Rachel’s lab wasn’t sound-proofed, but the various safety precautions did insulate it from any noise out here.

The DNM was still on the sofa, unmoved, and the house was as quiet as ever. That didn’t mean they hadn’t heard. Charlie shifted her gun to one hand and loped back to the kitchen, edging the door open with her foot. Copper pans hung from hooks - never used, not that Charlie could remember - and glossy red cupboards lined the wall. A large pine table that Charlie remembered from her childhood  used  to fill the middle of the room. Now it was broken in half, the two sides lying either side of Monroe, who was kneeling on the deactivated bot.

He glanced around at Charlie when crossed the threshold. His cheek was torn, light flickering under the skin as nanites stitched it back together.

‘I feel like I beat up my grandfather,’ he said, holding up the bot’s head to show her. It was a metal ovoid, with flat lenses for eyes and a mesh grille speaker instead of a mouth. The body under Monroe’s knee was all tubes and wires, barely humanoid.

Charlie had thought it was probably old tech, but she’d underestimated  how  old. 

‘Is that pre-Blackout?’ she asked.

Monroe turned it in his hands. ‘No.’ His arms flexed and he squeezed, crushing it into a flat envelope of wires and metal. ‘Analysis says that it is less than a year old, but it’s not hived. Pure solid-state engineering.’

Charlie hesitated. ‘That’s impossible.’ The City depended on nanite-power, but it wasn’t by choice. Since the Black-out, no other power worked. ‘It’s electric?’

He sat back on his heels, setting the ruined head down on the broken puppet body. ‘It  was. Once I breached its skin, it died.’

How? Charlie struggled for an answer for a second, trying to wrap her brain around how it could be possible. She couldn’t, but that was fine.

‘It’s not our job to work it out,’ she said. ‘We shoot the bad guys, we get Rachel and let the smart people figure this out.’

Monroe stood up easily, hooking his gun up off the floor. ‘You’re smart. For a human.’

‘Yeah? Well the smart thing to do is to get moving before someone comes looking for these two,’ Charlie said, backing out the door. The dead man was sprawled on the floor in a slightly bigger puddle of blood. Charlie hesitated and then dropped into a crouch next to the body, shoving his bloody head to the side so she could see his jaw. 

She hooked his thumb in his mouth and pulled it open, clenched muscles resisting briefly. 

‘What are you doing?’ Monroe asked.

A good portion of his jaw had been rebuilt, back teeth and plastic pink gums all synthetic. Charlie grimaced and shoved her fingers in until she was touching the synthetic join. ‘I want to know where this guy got his work done,’ she said. The data her arm cast up through the interface was more complicated than she could parse on the fly, so she locked it down into the NMC for later. Pulling her fingers back out, she wiped them on her thigh. ‘Maybe we can track down where these people are coming from, and if he has family let them know what happened to them.’

Monroe checked his gun with absently graceful hands, clicking a bullet into the chamber. ‘Charlie, just because you do, doesn’t mean everyone wants to know.’

‘Then they don’t have to listen.’ 

It was habit by now to fall into the familiar tactical formation, Monroe dropping back to watch her back as they hugged the walls and cut through to the back of the house. The entrance to the lab was behind a false wall and a state of the art security system. Impervious to hostile intrusions. At least, it was on this side.

Charlie counted down from three with her fingers. Three, two and the doors swung open on one. The stink of burned concrete and fire hit Charlie, the dusty stench catching in the back of her throat. As convinced as she had been that Baker’s kidnappers would come after Rachel, it twisted her gut to be right.

‘Damnit,’ she hissed.

Lunging through the door she snapped her gun up and moved to the left. The lab was low-ceilinged and thick walled, filled with sleek machines and clear, plastic screens full of flowing code. Charlie vaulted over the low bannister, dropping the flight down to the concrete. The people in the lab were still turning, expecting their friend with lunch. Whoever had trained them was good. The minute they registered something out of place they grabbed for their weapons.

Unlike the man in the hall, Charlie didn’t even think about what she was doing. Training curled her finger around the trigger, clearing her section of the room with a spray of bullets and noise. A woman by Rachel’s personal hive, the bullet taking the side of her head off; the body sitting in front of the computer, two bullets in the spine slumping it forward over the keyboard and spraying the screen with blood; a crop-headed red hair diving for cover, her bullet missing the kill zone and blowing out his thigh-bone.

Two of the screens caught bullets, carving divots out of the layered plastic and killing the code, and someone swore. Good.

Charlie was still moving as she fired, heading for the high-value target of the gene sequencer. If they were here for Rachel’s work, they’d not want to blow the hell out of that. And if they weren’t? It was still good cover.

On the stairs Monroe didn’t bother with evasive tactics. He pulled his other gun from the holster, semi-automatic pistols in both hands, and coldly picked off the two people in the hard corner out of Charlie’s angle of fire. The recoil would have broken Charlie’s elbows - one of her elbows - but Monroe might as well have been firing BB guns.

Hitting the ground, Charlie skidded into the side of the sequencer. She took a second, just long enough for a cordite-tasting breath and a finger wriggled in her ear to try and dislodge the ringing noise. It didn’t work. 

Under the high pitched jangle, someone was screaming and Monroe was heavy-footing his way down the stairs. There were three more people in the room, and the advantage of surprise had been played out. Bullets kicked up shrapnel in front of Charlie and two hit Monroe in the desk, rocking him back on his heels for a second.

‘Time,’ Charlie yelled. 

Stupid, she realised instantly. That had been her and Miles’ shorthand for the field. She went to correct herself, but Monroe got in first.

‘One on your eight. Two behind the hand on five,’ he said smoothly. He lifted his right hand and fired twice. Another screamer. ‘Make that one and a half.’

‘Not even asking,’ Charlie said. 

She shifted, getting her knees under her, and risked a quick look around the side of the sequencer. Eight was a grey-haired woman who’d flipped a heavy, steel examining table and was sheltering behind it. Her sleeves were rolled, exposing bare, muscled arms slashed with v’s. She fired a blind spray of bullets in Charlie’s direction, making Charlie jerk back behind the sequencer.

Splintered bits of concrete shrapnel prickled in her hand. Charlie brushed them away, and remembered the hidden tally marks on Duncan. They’d been v’s too.

‘Put your gun down and arms up,’ Charlie said, ‘You’re under arrest.’

It sounded ridiculous, Charlie realised the minute the words left her mouth. There were dead people on the floor and Charlie’s ears were full of after-shock noise. She wasn’t even on duty right now, and once the MMPD found out about this she never would be again. Even Clayton wouldn’t have her back. It was just habit. Or trying to pretend things hadn’t gone shit-up.

‘Bitch,’ Eight said, voice rough and ragged. ‘Go fuck yourself.’

‘Wrong answer.’ Charlie took two blind pot-shots at Eight’s location. One hit the table with a gong-like echo, and the other lodged in something that yelped. A yelp meant they weren’t dead though.

Monroe had been forced back by concentrated fire by the two - make that one and a half - hidden behind a support pillar. His chest was a torn mass of fabric and fake skin, metal bones and tender circuitry exposed. He was pinned by the stairs until the hive caught up with the damage. 

Dominate the room . That had been Miles instruction during training,  after  training. He’d scruffed the smug polish of a good score off her and told her ‘don’t be careful, don’t be prudent. If you get pinned down in a firefight, you’re probably outnumbered and you’re definitely dead.’

Maybe he’d been an asshole and maybe he’d been a traitor, but there hadn’t been many people better than Miles in a fight. Charlie took a deep breath of scorched, cordite-sharp air and rolled out of cover, aiming on instinct as she scrambled back to her feet.

‘Charlie!’ Monroe yelled. ‘Get down!’

Eight had her gun up and aimed too, white-rimmed eyes staring desperately along the barrel. They fired at nearly the same time, but Charlie’s bullet was the closest to target. She got a hot, hard punch to the thigh, while Eight’s jaw shattered and she slumped forward over the table, gun dropping from her hand.

Staggering on her injured leg - it didn’t  hurt , just felt strangely heavy - Charlie dove past the still dying Eight and behind the table. Bullets spat behind her, the familiar deep bark of the MMPD issued gun and the slightly higher whine of the intruders. She rolled into cover with no more damage, shoving herself into a sitting position and leaning against the table. Her leg was pulsing with warmth, a dull red stain slowly soaking through her jeans. Charlie pressed her hand to the wound, digging her fingers in to try and stem the slow bleed.

‘Idiot,’ Monroe snapped at her. 

She laughed breathlessly, then glanced guiltily at Eight’s body. It didn’t seem right, although it wasn’t as if Charlie had broken into  her  home. 

‘Behind the hand on five?’ she said.

‘Just a half now,’ Monroe said. His voice was flat and the gun spat again. ‘Clear.’

He appeared around the table and frowned at her. ‘We’re going to talk about this later, Charlie.’ Crouching down he pushed her hand away from her leg and ripped her jeans, staring at the wound with bright eyes. ‘Through and through. I’m going to have to patch this here.’

‘Yeah,’ Charlie said, lifting her knee so he could get his hands around her thigh. ‘I figured.’

‘It’ll hurt.’

She grimaced a smirk. ‘Always does.’

His hands flexed tight, squeezing hard enough to make her hiss and shift, and he dug his thumb and finger into the hole. It hadn’t  actually hurt until then. She bit her lower lip, twisting it between her teeth, and breathed in hard through her nose. Her eyes were locked on his bloody hands.

‘Charlie,’ he said. She looked up into his pretty blue eyes and he smiled at her. ‘Sorry.’

His hands flashed with heat and Charlie convulsed, smacking her head hard against the table behind her. The smell of cooking flesh - her cooking flesh - make her stomach turn hard, and she tasted blood and bile in the back of her throat.

Monroe’s hands cooled down as quickly as they’d heated up and he pulled his fingers away, taking scabs of cooked black flesh with him. Her leg was burning, hot and pulsing heavy. It wasn’t bleeding anymore, though. 

‘I am sorry,’ Monroe said, touching the back of his fingers to her face.

‘What’s one more scar?’ Charlie asked, her voice rough and scraping. She cleared her throat and wiped her bloody hands on the ground. ‘Come on, we need to get going. We’ve still got Rachel’s lab and the vault to clear.’

Monroe shoved himself to his feet and offered her his hand. She reached for it, fingers just about to touch his, when a gauss-blast hit him in the side and flung him away. The shock of it dragged a scream from Charlie when the pain hadn’t worked. She was still mid-scream when Monroe crashed into the wall, cracking the reinforced concrete, and slid down to the ground. Synthetic flesh and skin had been flayed off his bones by the blast, leaving his long bones and wires raw and bare. His face was gone from the nose down, and he made one abortive, juddering attempt to get up. Then his eyes dulled and he went limp.

Emergency override, Charlie told herself, biting back another cry. The nanites couldn’t split the hive between function and repair, so they’d shut him down. He’d be fine, so she needed to worry about herself.

She grabbed her gun and dragged her good leg up under her. Moving hurt, but the uppers were still running hot in her blood. 

‘This ain’t your fault, kid, but I can’t let you leave here,’ a low, gruff voice said. ‘Clayton should have known better than to send you in here on your own.’

It hurt. Charlie spat blood on the ground and shoved herself to her feet, staggering as her leg threatened to give way under her. She leveled the gun across the room, finger sweating on the trigger.

‘What the fuck have you done with my mom?’

Shock on his face, Miles put a hand out to push the gauss-gun muzzle down. The shooter, his face a more beat up version of Monroe’s, gave him a questioning look. 

‘Charlie?’ Miles said.


	22. Chapter 22

 

The walls of Charlie's brain were trying to close in around her, fencing her off with rubble and screams and pain. The taste of blood and dust in her mouth made her want to spit. Not now. Not  now.

Her hand was shaking, the muzzle of the gun twitching, as adrenaline and department approved drugs hair-trigger primed her muscles for flight or fight. Or just failing. That was an option too. She tightened her fingers on the gun, the edges of the grip digging into her palm, and glared at Miles. Anger, resentment, accusation filled her - a smoke-walled greenhouse of negativity to keep the panic at bay. It was all she had. 

'Where's my mom,' she repeated, biting each word off between her teeth. It kept the sob-wobble of stress at the back of her throat, not the tip of her tongue. ‘What have you done, Miles?’

He looked...disappointed, scrubbing a hand through his hair and grimacing. Like  she’d let  him down. Charlie almost shot him, just...shot him. Her finger tightened on the trigger, sensors measuring  exactly the micrometers of pressure exerted.

‘Don’t think about it, kid,’ the MRN next to Miles said, shifting the gauss-gun against his hip. ‘He bleeds, you turn into splatter art.’

‘Shut up, Bass,’ Miles growled. ‘You hurt her,  I’ll  kill you.’

‘What?’ the MRN drawled, not taking its eyes off Charlie. ‘Again?’

Miles stepped forward, putting himself between the gun and Charlie. Or was it between Charlie and the shooter? She licked her lips, imagining pennies, and shifted position so she could see both of them. The barrel of the gun shifted from one to the other, jerking with every twitch and movement.

‘Charlie. I’m not here to hurt your mom,’ Miles said, holding his hands out and edging forwards. He stepped in a puddle of blood and ignored it, traipsing heavy booted footprints across the floor. ‘I don’t know what she’s told you -’

The gun snapped back to his face and stayed there, Charlie’s hands suddenly steady. ‘Nothing,’ she said flatly. ‘Neither did you, and you know what, Miles? Right now I don’t give a fuck. All I want to know is where she is...and Miles, you trained me. I know better than to let you get any closer. So don’t try.’

Miles stopped in place and cracked a grin, scratching the stubble on his jaw lazily. ‘That’s my girl,’ he said.

‘No,’ Charlie said. ‘I’m not. Where is she, Miles?’

He was staring at her like she was a puzzle to solve. ‘I don’t know. Charlie, it’s  me.  You have to trust me.’

‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Because you’ll always come back? Because you won’t leave me?’

His hands dropped to his sides. ‘I had to go, Charlie. It was...complicated. I’d done stuff I had to fix and-’

Her hand jerked down and she fired into the ground at Miles’ feet, concrete divoting and spitting up splinters. If you’d put her on the spot, she couldn’t have sworn whether she’d pulled the trigger or moved her hand first. 

‘Fuck you,’ she said flatly. ‘I don’t have to trust you, and I don’t have to listen to you lying. What are you doing-’

Out of the corner of her eye she caught a hitch of movement and twisted, attention flicking past Miles’ shoulder to the scruffy looking MNR. The moment her eyes moved, she knew it was  stupid. That was already too late. Miles crossed the distance between them in two long steps, grabbed her arm and twisted. Tried to.

Metal and synthskin stayed rigid where flesh and bone would have bent. She should have shot him then, except her fingers froze. Interface glitch, she could tell herself that. In the second of hesitation, Miles was surprised, adapted and used her arm as a fulcrum to flip her over his hip.

That worked. Charlie hit the ground with a thud. She rolled and kicked, her foot catching the hinge of his knee. He cursed and turned his stumble into a grapple, using his weight - he might look like whipcord, sinew and bad judgement, but it was all muscle - to pin her to the ground. His knee jammed into the small of her back and he grabbed her right arm, twisting it up behind her back until she could nearly scratch her own ear. 

Trapped. It wasn't like Delphi - it  wasn't \- but the walls closed in a little closer around Charlie. She breathed in dust from the floor and her heart kicked a nervous beat, not at all convinced by her mantra of 'not Delphi'. She clenched her teeth until her jaw hurt.

'Let go of the gun.' His voice was whiskey rough in her ear.

There wasn't, she supposed bitterly, any point in defying him. Apparently she wasn't going to shoot him. Idiot. The fingers of her free hand flexed and the gun dropped to the ground. The MNR stepped forward and kicked it out of the way with a cracked, black leather workboot. The gun went bouncing over the floor and slid under one of the containment boxes. 

'I'll need that back,' Charlie wise-cracked in a tight voice. 'They take inventory.'

Miles snorted a laugh and relaxed his grip on her arm, relieving some of the pressure on her shoulder. It made it easier to breath. Not easy.

‘Charlie,’ he said. ‘Kid. I’ve missed you.’

She snapped her head back into his face. From the crack of impact, pain starbursting white in her brain, she’d missed his nose and caught him across the cheekbone. He swore and bore down on her, bracing his forearm across her shoulders and shoving

That hurt. Stress yanked at torn muscles, old scarring, the necessary trauma of the interface replacement…that  hurt.  Charlie screwed her eyes up tight, tears squeezing itchily through her lashes, and went limp. 

Fuck him. Fuck him and fuck Delphi. She could do this.

‘I probably deserved that,’ Miles muttered quietly. ‘But  enough , Charlie. You’re not winning. Now, if I let you up, are you going to behave?’

‘Fuck you.’

‘Is that a yes or a no?’

Charlie pressed her lips into a thin, resentful line. She was angry at him, furious with herself and none of it was going to do any good while she had a gauss-gun on her.

‘I’ll be a good girl,’ she said sourly, the words breathy from pain. ‘Let me up.’

He rolled off her and, this time, he made sure to get out of range before she got back to her feet. Charlie pushed her forehead down against the ground until it hurt, breathing in ragged huffs. The long, stark stretch of Miles’ shadow shifted towards her across the ground. ‘Charlie? Charlotte.’

It was the MNR who spoke up for her. ‘Back off her, Miles. You know better than that.’ 

Charlie glanced up at him. He looked like Monroe - a bit older, a bit scruffier around the edges - but his blue eyes were cold. Measuring her value. She got her elbows under her and shoved herself up onto her knees. The breath she sucked in sounded like a sob. Charlie scrubbed her hand over her mouth, muffling the sound before it could get purchase.

The MNR just watched her with cool, unnerving regard. She looked away, towards Miles. It had been his mouth she caught earlier, his lip split and bloody. He dragged his hand over his mouth and wiped the blood on his jeans.

‘You’ve learned some new tricks, kid,’ he said. ‘Clayton teach you that one?’

Charlie grabbed the edge of the table and dragged herself up. The table shifted under her weight, dislodging the dead woman from her perch. The corpse slid to the ground with a soft, boneless thud, face staring at high roof with blind eyes.

‘What do you want?’ she asked.

A rueful smile cracked the split in Miles’ lip wider. ‘That’s a loaded question, Charlie.’

‘You’re a terrorist, Miles,’ Charlie said. ‘It’s the only question.’

He took a deep, resigned breath. ‘Yeah, I suppose I am,’ he muttered. ‘Charlie, I  will  explain. Just not yet. Bass? Get the bot, I’ll get Charlie out of harm’s way.’

The MNR - Bass - glanced briefly from Charlie to Miles, then back. ‘Arm first,’ he said, gesturing with his chin. When she scowled at him he gave a tight, empty smile that didn’t reach his eyes. ‘It’s nice work, I’ll keep it safe.’

Charlie shrugged her jacket off and reached across her body, wrapping her fingers tight around her bicep. A focused thought decoupled the interface and her arm slid off. It felt shameful, worse than being naked. She wasn’t going to give it to him. Instead she tossed into onto one of the desks, the skin colour fading to stark white synth.

‘Feel better?’ she asked, lifting her chin.

For a second Bass just stared at her, eyes narrowing slightly. This time the smile did reach his eyes, just. ‘Oh yeah, so much,’ he said. ‘Miles, don’t waste your time trying to play nice. We need to move.’

He slung the gauss-gun onto his back and strode by Charlie to grab Monroe’s jacket. His fist twisted in the heavy fabric and he dragged Monroe’s damaged carcass over the floor. Despite her unwillingness to show weakness, Charlie couldn’t help the low sound of protest that escaped her.

‘If you hurt him-’

Bass grunted. ‘You’re in no position to make threats, Hopalong. Worry about yourself.’

He hauled Monroe out of the room, the bots heavy boots clunking over the threshold. It felt nearly as bad as taking her arm off, like she’d lost something important. He’d be fine. Once the critical injuries were repaired, the nanites would reboot him. Then he could….

‘What happened, Charlie?’ Miles asked.

She looked at him for the first time since she’d taken her jacket off, since he saw the scars and the missing bits. The ones that were obvious. He looked horrified. Charlie supposed she couldn’t blame him, it had put her back on her heels too. 

‘Miles, my Dad wasn’t in the Tower was he,’ she asked. Her mouth twitched but she got the rest of the question out. ‘It wasn’t him in the unmarked crate?’

It might as well have been a rhetorical question. She didn’t need Miles hesitation, his pity or his slow nod. Sometime between Bass shooting Monroe and him taking her arm, she’d worked it out for herself. Artificial lifeforms didn’t age, they didn’t turn stubble into scruffy beards or pick up new scars at the corner of their eye. The answer was just the nail in the coffin of her stupid, childish fantasy.

‘No,’ Miles said. He hesitated. ‘Charlie...’

She took a deep and squared her shoulders, rejecting his sympathy before he could wave it at her. ‘Delph happened to me, Miles,’ she said, voice rough with anger. She wanted to hurt him as much as she’d just hurt herself, presenting herself like an accusation. ‘You left me to die, and this was what they dragged out. So fuck you, don’t ever ask me to trust you again.’


	23. Chapter 23

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the short chapter! I'm not going to have too much time this week, so I'm not sure how much writing I'll get done.

'Kid,' Miles said, his voice rough as bad whiskey. 'You look like shit.'

It made her laugh, a hiccup of sound that escaped her better judgement. He grinned at her, that crooked slant of his mouth that had always made her feel... Not safe. She'd been  tired of being safe, of being protected. Miles had always made her feel in on the joke that was their lives. 

Except that had been a lie too, hadn't it. The first, the best. She looked away from him, scrubbing her callus rough hand over her face and shaking her head. 'Don't. Please? We aren't friends, Miles. Not now.'

Miles reached out, ignoring her instinctual flinch, and tucked the heavy fall of her hair behind her ear. His thumb was rough against her cheek when his hand lingered. 'So how come Nora isn't here?' he asked. Dropping his hand to her shoulder, he tugged the worn collar of her t-shirt. 'How come you're not badged up?'

Charlie flinched at the reminder. Miles’d might have hated wearing it - preferring old jeans and broken in boots - but he knew how much the uniform meant to her. The idea occurred to Charlie that there was probably no-one who knew her better than Miles, so how could she ever trust anything from him.There was no-one who knew which of her buttons to push better than him.

‘You and Rachel, you’re the only family I have,’ Charlie said. She twisted her face around the taste that left in her mouth. ‘So yeah, I won’t turn you over to Neville if I have a choice. That doesn’t mean we’re ok.’

‘I didn’t do any of this to hurt you.’

‘Why then?’ Charlie asked.’Why did you do it, Miles?  What  did you do?’

Maybe if he told her, it would be ok. Just for a second, she thought that maybe he could do it. There had to be something he’d say that would make sense of the last two years, make it so all that anger just went away. She was almost desperate for that to be truth.

Miles looked away, his eyes sliding shiftily away from her face, and he tongued his lower lip. ‘Charlie, this isn’t the time.’

Of course not. She sniffed and wiped her nose on the back of her arm. ‘I’m sorry, Miles.’

He gave her a confused look, his forehead creasing as he frowned. ‘You? No,’ he pulled her closer, both hands on her shoulder and leaned down towards her. ‘Charlie. You’ve  nothing  to be sorry for. You-’

She headbutted him. He staggered backwards, swearing and blinking tearing eyes. Charlie spun and kicked him in the stomach, hammering her heel into the space just under his ribs. All she had was surprise and the fact he didn’t want to hurt her. She grabbed her arm, wrapping her fingers around the wrist, and swung it like a club. The interface reinforced end caught Miles in the jaw and he went down, groaning and half-conscious.

Charlie dropped to her knees next to him, impact jarring up her thighs, and checked his jaw with quick, professional fingers. Nothing broken under the scruff of stubble, and she was idiot enough to be relieved. She rolled him onto his stomach and dragged his arms behind his back, pinning them clumsily with her knee while she pulled a whip-cuff strip out of her back pocket; The flash of heat when she snapped the polymer into place made Chase groan and flex his fingers, tendons standing out in his wrists as he strained against the restraints.

‘Got into a lot of barfights this year, Miles,’ she told him, searching his pockets briskly and patting down his legs. The hold-out was tucked into his boot. She took it, sticking it into the back of her jeans. ‘I’ve learned the value of hitting people with something unexpected. I  am  sorry. Just like you. It doesn’t change anything.’

She scrambled to her feet, reattaching her arm with clumsy haste. A knot of anxiety in her stomach relaxed as the interface made her body match the map of it in her brain again. She flexed both shoulders, gritting her teeth against the burn of abuse, and stooped down to grab the dead merc’s gun. It was heavy and unfamiliar in her hands, structured differently than weapons she was used to.

Not so unfamiliar that she couldn’t use it. She worked her hand around the butt of the gun, finding the right grip to let her reach the trigger. Now all she had to do was get Monroe back. She was halfway across the room when Miles groaned her name.

She hesitated. The smart thing to do was kill him, or at least ignore him. Instead she turned around, like she was dragged by a wire attached to her ear. Miles had squirmed onto his side, wiping his bloody jaw on his sleeve.

‘Charlie, don’t do this,’ he said. ‘You don’t know what you’re getting into.’

‘Yeah, well, whose fault is that?’ Charlie asked, shrugging. She hesitated. ‘You could have trusted me, you know?’

Miles twisted himself into a sitting position, bracing his hands against the floor behind his ass. He looked at her like she was missing something important. ‘That’s the last thing I would do, Charlie,’ he said. ‘Not with this. The last thing I wanted was to hurt you.’

‘Yeah, well, don’t worry,’ Charlie said, lifting the gun. ‘I don’t need protecting anymore, Miles.’

This time, when she turned away, she didn’t look back. Not even when he called her name.

‘I thought you weren’t going to turn me in, Charlie,’ he said.

‘Yeah, well, I thought you could get out of those cuffs in 10 minutes,’ Charlie reminded him as she paused in the doorway and checked the hall. ‘That was drunk. I’m sure you’ll be out before the cops get here.’

That was her one advantage here. She knew him pretty well too.

 


	24. Chapter 24

Bass dragged the MNR model across the threshold into the garage of Rachel’s little lab of horrors. The light was glaring in here, no tinted glass or angles to soften the harsh white brilliance of it. He dragged the thing over to the edge of the loading bay and dropped its feet, boots hitting the concrete with a thud. Rubbing his hand over his mouth, stubble scraping against his palm, he looked down at it.

It didn’t look like him. Looking ‘like’ someone was having the same eye-colour and glare as your little sister, it was some guy with vaguely the same face shape and hair cut. It didn’t look  like  him, it was him. The old scar dimple on his forehead from where Miles had hit him with a Tonka truck, the line of his mouth and squint of his eyes - it was all there, his face growing back over metal bones.

Bass grimaced away the disoriented feeling and braced his foot against the limp sprawl of junk’s shoulder. The torn, healing skin stretched and slid under the heel of his boot. He kicked it over the edge of the loading bay, letting it crack against the flat metal bed of the truck. The clockwork insect-bots they had left stared flatly at the body, then looked up at him with flat, black lens-eyes. Waiting for orders.

‘Disable it, secure it, and get it ready for transport,’ he said. ‘Get it done. Now.’

It was strange, the things that fouled up with disuse. His voice sounded like crows had been nesting in his throat and the old injury to his shoulder, that used to twinge in cold weather, now seized up like a half-melted GI in the mornings. Old habits though, they stayed sharp. Old  instincts.

The scuff of footsteps coming down the hall was expected, but then his brain caught up with his ears. Light footed and quick, the familiar scuff-slide pattern of a recce op. No reason for Miles to be sneaking, and he had a longer stride.

Bass turned, cocking his elbow out and swinging the heavy gun around so could grab it, as the girl came through the door. She already had her gun up. Bass cocked his head, sighting along the side of the weapon. Make that Miles’ gun. His eyes slid along her arm - nothing about the taut line of lightly tanned skin betraying it was only ‘like’ an arm - to the firm curve of her breast. Make that woman, not girl.

Every time Miles talked about her, he made her sound like a hero-worshipping kid. Not an angry woman with fierce blue eyes and practical scarred hands.

The once over took seconds - his eyes were already back on her face as the distant thoughts finished sliding through his brain. Both of them had their fingers on the trigger. She wanted to shoot him. He could see it in the tight line of her mouth, the way her finger was tight on the trigger.

‘Put the gun down.’

He raised his eyebrow. ‘You first.’

She gave him a tight, twist of a smile. ‘No.’

‘If I pull this trigger, you’ll be a smear on the wall, Charlotte,’ he said. She blinked at the use of her name, but the steady aim of the gun didn’t twitch a hair. ‘I’m not Miles, I won’t hesitate.’

‘Neither will I,’ Charlie said. ‘Smear on the wall or neat little hole in the head, it won’t really make any difference will it? So it’s not about which of us is going to die more, it’s which of is more scared of it.’

He snorted a humourless huff of a laugh and gave her his best grin. The one that made people flutter or flinch, depending on how close they looked at his eyes. ‘You think I’m scared of dying.’

She edged to the side, moving out of the doorway and towards the pit. The wary flick of her eyes meant that Miles was alive - Bass had assumed that - and wasn’t impaired in any long-term way. He let her move, turning with her like they were hands in a clock. Long, grubby gold hair slid over her shoulder as she glanced into the pit, her mouth tightening at whatever the bots were doing down there. 

An odd urge to push her hair back so he could see her eyes hit him. He wanted her attention focused on him. ‘Charlotte,’ he said. 

Her attention flicked back to him. There was a tightness along her jaw, a twitch of muscle and a collection of bruises. ‘I think you lost ten years of your life because my mother stuck you in a coffin and buried you alive in the Tower,’ she said. Her tongue dabbed over her lower lip, slicking damp over pink skin. ‘I think you probably really resent that, and probably really want those lost years back. So no, I don’t think you’re scared of death. I think you’re scared of dying here though, and now.’

They stared at each other for a second, their confrontation soundtracked to the clatter of the bots working. Then Bass dropped the gun, letting the weight swing from his shoulders, and held his hands up. It was instinct, an urge he couldn’t quite explain - to do this instead of killing her. He bent his knees slowly, crouching down towards the cold floor. The muscles in his thighs clenched, tight as they held onto his shifting balance. 

‘OK.’ he said. ‘I’ve put my gun down. Your turn.’

Charlie narrowed her eyes at him and twitched the gun down. ‘Put the gun on the floor, and your hands behind your head.’

He nodded his head agreeably and ducked his head, pulling the strap over his shoulder. It was lighter than you might have expected, considering the damage it could inflict. Still heavy enough to crush her knee, shatter her ribs or break that pretty, battered face. He’d seen her fight. She was good. He was better.

Instead he tossed the gun at her. She batted it aside instead of trying to catch it - smart girl - but Bass was already up and moving. The arm wasn’t a weak target, he’d seen how well that worked out for Miles, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t useful. He shoved his elbow under her arm, up into her armpit, and threw his weight behind it. She swore, breath hot and frustrated against his ear, and they hit the wall. He got his arm up and across her throat, pushing her chin up, and a flex of his wrist dropped a knife into his hand, pressed it against the crease of her thigh. Her body was all soft curves, but it was like her arm. The softness was just a layer over the hard, wiry muscle underneath.

She smelled like guns and blood. Twisting her around she dug her fingers into the nape of his neck. Blue eyes glared down the straight, freckled line of her nose at him. This close, he could see the faint bump where it had broken once. ‘That was stupid,’ she said.

‘Yeah,’ he agreed. ‘It was.’

Except he didn’t care. For the first time since Miles had dragged him out of the Tower - he didn’t  remember that bit, didn’t remember arriving or leaving - he felt...excited. The cold sludge in his chest that refused to shift, had given way to the hot thrill of action.

Violence. Call it what it was. Hers. His. At least it was something.

‘You’ve got questions,’ he said. ‘Once I’m dead, there’ll be no answers. We both know, Miles can’t be trusted.’

'And you can?'

He jerked his head to the side. 'That thing's based on me, Charlotte. Everything I am went into its tin can of a head. You trust it?'

It was useful that that she nodded - mouth a white line of reluctance at even giving him that much - but it still pissed him off.


	25. Chapter 25

The heavy gates folded back, rolling in on themselves as if they were made of silk, and the truck - its unconscious passenger hidden under a lashed down tarp - drove out of the garage. Bass watched it go, absently folding his sleeve back to strap the knife back to his forearm. He could still the warmth of Charlie’s thigh against his knuckles, the memory of her anger crawling under his skin like emotion.

‘You could wait for Miles,’ he’d said. 

Her wide, mobile mouth had done something complicated and unhappy, eyes sliding away from his as if that made it easier to lie. 

‘I don’t want to see him,’ she said. ‘I don’t  need  to see him if you keep your word.’

Tugging his sleeve back down, he waited as the doors sealed again. Bending down as he walked by he hooked his fingers into the strap of the gun, swinging it up onto his shoulder. The weight of it thumped against his back as he went looking for his brother.

Miles was on his feet, stripping broken strings of plastic from skinned wrists, in the middle of the mess Charlotte had made of the lab. She was an efficient little wrecking ball, Bass noted as he glanced around at the debris and the dead. There had been a time he’d have felt something over dead soldiers, even if they were chance-met mercs. Not now.

When Miles saw Bass his mouth did the same complicated and unhappy thing as his niece's. He straightened up, rubbing his wrists absently. 'Charlie?' he asked, voice gruff and tight. It was like he thought you could sand down emotions if you got your attitude rough enough.

‘You know, I always wondered,’ Bass said, rubbing his thumb absently over the moulded stock of the gauss-gun. ‘Timing was about right, wasn’t it? You blew me and Vegas off to go and meet your new sister-in-law? You were in vile, fucking mood when you got back.’

Miles scratched his lower lip with his thumb. ‘Fuck you, Bass. What did you do to Charlie?’

He laughed and looked down, kicking at a smear of blood on the floor with his heel. ‘Isn’t the question what did you do to her mom?’

In the corner of his eye the blur that was Miles started forwards. Bass snapped the gun up, aiming it at Miles chest. ‘Don’t. Brother.’

There had been a time Miles would just have snorted and finished whatever he was doing. When neither of them would have wondered if Bass would pull the trigger. Now Miles stopped, fists clenched in frustrated anger. ‘Bass, she’s just a kid.’

‘Your kid?’

‘Does it matter?’ Miles demanded, voice cracking in frustration. 

‘Yeah.’

Closing his eyes, Miles pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘No,’ he said. ‘She isn’t. Ben told me that. He had a test done. It turned out, he knew all along what I’d done. My big brother, the genius.’

The genius. The good man. The husband and father. What would never occur to Miles, who simultaneously worshipped and resented the brother who’d gotten out and left him with their drunk bag of a mother, was that Ben was a good man - not a perfect one. Bass, though, he’d seen Ben lie straight-faced to God, the world and his bitch of a wife. Not lightly, not for  nothing,  but well.

Ben would have lied to keep Miles away from the kid. Back then Miles hadn’t been...good for people.

‘I let her go.’ Bass lowered the gun. ‘Charlotte. I didn’t hurt her, Miles.’

Miles breathed out a slow, controlled sigh of relief and nodded. ‘OK. Thank you, where is she? I need to talk to her. To-’

‘Explain? Like you did for me?’

Guilt turned Miles’ eyes black and his shoulders slumped. ‘I can’t apologise any more, Bass. I did what I thought was right. So for fuck’s sake, forgive me or kill me. Just get on with it, before Clayton gets here.’

Neither of those options worked for Bass. He supposed he’d have to pick one, eventually, but not yet. He shoved his hand through his hair, knotted curls snagging around his knuckles. ‘I let Charlotte take the car.’

Jarred out of his guilt, Miles gave Bass an irritated look. ‘Oh for fuck’s sake, Bass. You pick  now  to play Prince Charming.’

‘More Sleeping Beauty, really, aren’t I,’ Bass said dryly. He strode over to the dead merc at the computer and grabbed his shoulder, peeling the dead, seeping weight of the guy off the chair. The screen was shattered, wet bits of brain skewered on shards of glass, so they’d have to hope the tick had got what they needed. He reached back and peeled the narrow strip out of circuitry off the back, applying it tidily to the inside of his wrist. It made his fingers feel slightly numb, slightly stiff as it leeched the electricity it needed to run out of his nervous system. ‘She needed something to move the bot, didn’t she? Not like she could throw it over her shoulder.’

Miles swore, inventively and viciously and at length. ‘We need it, Bass. It’s got the answers.’

‘I didn’t have a choice.’

That got him a sceptical snort as they strode out of the lap, heading away from the garage. Miles pulled a slick, black pair of gloves out his pocket and pulled them on, grimacing unhappily as they went fluid and disappeared under the cuff of his jacket.

‘You’re not that rusty,’ Miles groused, scratching at the nano-seal over his abraded wrist. ‘She’s good, she’s not as good as you.’

‘Kicked your ass.’

‘She’s my niece. I was holding back.’

Bass snorted a laugh at that. Reaching back he dragged the hood from under his jacket, but left it dangling over his collar. The nano-suits were less psychically traumatic than getting skinned, but it still wasn’t pleasant. Their heavy boots rattled on the floor, casting dull echoes back from the lined walls as they walked. All the time since the lights went out, the betrayal, the years spent on ice...and they still fell into formation as naturally as breathing.

There was a battered old steel door at the end of the corridor, it opened into a narrow shelf-lined store room with a single, dislodged ceramic tile leading down into the dark.

It had Ben’s bolthole, back in the day. Rachel had known about it, after what they’d done, but she must have thought it might be useful one day. Bass tugged at his hood absently, and wondered how pissed she’d be to know she’d made their lives easier.

‘She’s alive,’ Bass said. ‘That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?’ Wanted it, Bass thought, more than Charlie did. She’d skewered Bass back in the loading bay, but it had been a two-edged bit of perception. In pointing out how much he wanted to claw back some of his life, she’d revealed how unconcerned she was with losing hers. Not suicidal, not actively, but.... He’d seen plenty like her before, in the world with power and the one without. Careless.

Miles grumbled under his breath ‘fucking idiot’, but quit arguing as the oppressive, sub-sound vibe of the approaching MMPD cruisers growled through them. He pulled a knife and pried a panel off the wall, pulling out a spaghetti handful of leads and stripping the sealer off them.

‘So what now?’ he asked. ‘According to Baker, that’s the last MNR in existence.’

‘Except for the original,’ Bass mumbled. He shrugged off Miles’ cautious, side-long look and pulled the hood down over his face. It sealed over his mouth like wet silk, dropping a cobwebby filter over the world. ‘She’ll bring him to us tomorrow, in return for me telling her everything.’

Miles fumbled the knife, dropping it with a clatter. Not like him. Piss drunk and upside down and Miles could shave with a broken switchblade. He was _good_ with anything edged. Now he just left it on the floor, gloved fingers stalled on the stripped wires.

‘Huh,’ he muttered, folding his lower lip under his tongue. ‘Everything. I suppose that’s...fair enough.’

Hate him or not, Miles was still Bass’ brother. ‘Not that,’ Bass said, voice muffled by the mask. ‘Don’t worry, Miles, I won’t tell her that.’

Miles nodded, and stiffly bullied his fingers into moving again. Copper filament prickled at his fingertips as he worked, plucking the fine weave of the cloth. Done he turned and clambered down through the hole, sliding down the ladder and out of sight. Bass dropped in after him, pausing to drag the heavy ceramic tile back into place.

Overhead there was a hungry whoosh and a slap of heat that scalded his face even through the floor. When the MMPD finally made their way into the building, they’d find nothing but slag where the lab should be.

When it came to safety measures, Rachel didn’t fuck around. Bass hung there for a second and then swarmed down the ladder.

‘I won’t tell her you’re the one that killed Ben,’ he reassured the dark under his feet.


	26. Chapter 26

Charlie bought a cheap bottle of half-filtered water, washing her hands and face in the stale-smelling liquid. It dripped pink between her fingers as she dislodged the scabs and crusts of blood. She grimaced and took a gulp of the dregs of the bottle, swilling it around her mouth and spitting out the window. No wonder the vendor had looked at her cross-eyed.

It was Delphi though, so a suspicious look and a wide berth was all she got. Charlie rolled the van window back up and sat back in the driver’s seat, hanging her wrists over the steering wheel. The reflection of her hands were caught in the windscreen. One was pale and perfect, the other had bloody knuckles and swollen fingers. Despite the makeshift scrub, her fingernails were rimed with blood worked down into the cuticles. The thump-screech of a band hammered at the background of her attention, filtered through windows and concrete.

Usually, this deep into Delphi, she’d be looking to pick a fight, trying to convince the coward inside her that she didn’t want to run away. Tonight she was just hollow. The fear was still there, but she’d just not got enough left to actually  feel  it.

Her Dad was dead - he had been for years, but thanks to her stupidity it felt new again - and Rachel was missing. Miles had brought Monroe’s template back to life, and everyone was keeping secrets from her. 

Except  him.  Maybe, if she believed him. The thought made Charlie shift uncomfortably. It felt right to trust that face, but those familiar eyes had  un familiar thoughts behind them. Her hand dropped to her thigh, fingering the sliced through denim. He could have killed her; she could have killed him. Neither of them had. Was that trust? Or just a sign she really  should  have talked to her psych more. Maybe about something she hadn’t made up in the car.

Charlie scrubbed her hand over her mouth and popped the door open, sliding out of the seat into the alley. She supposed it didn’t matter. Right now it - whatever  it  was - was all she had.

Well, it and him. She climbed up into the back of the truck, the suspension already under such strain that it didn’t even move, and folded the tarp back to his waist. The shredded ruin that...he...had made of his chest was mended, skin smooth and tight over hard muscle. He wasn’t breathing, but then he never did. Charlie didn’t know what else she could use to tell if he was going to wake up.

‘Monroe,’ she said, patting his cheek. ‘C’mon. We don’t have time for you to be dead.’

Nothing.

She shifted back, her weight on the balls of her feet, and chewed on the raw bump of her knuckle. Baker was gone. Her mom was gone. Everyone who was a legitimate expert on the nanotech was gone (or dead). She took a deep breath of cold, damp stone air - making the fear pulse fretfully behind her ribs to remind her it was still there - and let it out on a heavy sigh. 

Of course, that left the  illegitimate  experts.

After this?,’ she breathed, pulling the tarp back up over his face. ‘You are gonna owe me, toaster-boy.’

The failure to object to the insult made her wince. Damn it, having a bot for a partner should have made not-caring easier. It wasn’t fair. 

For a second, as she scrambled out of the truck bed, she wondered if this was what Rachel felt about her army of Danny-clones. Then she shoved the niggle away, because she wasn’t ready to be fair to  anyone  about that. Not yet, maybe not ever. 

She boosted herself back up into the cab and started the engine, pulling a face at the oily, consumptive cough of it. It was pre-Blackout, all raw gas and heat. Most people only had one if they were trading over the Wall. They were rare in the city, even in Delphi it would raise eyebrows. She didn’t have much choice though. 

‘Call Jason,’ she said out loud, twisting around to try and squeeze the unresponsive hunk out of the narrow alley. ‘Connect through the Matheson hive.’

It  took a minute, and he sounded breathless and...happy…when he answered.

‘Neville.’

Charlie could hear someone laughing in the background. She waited for the hot cramp of pain, but there was nothing. She wasn’t  happy  for him, but it didn’t hurt either. Maybe she really had burned out her feelings.

‘Jason, it’s Charlie,’ she said.

He hesitated and she heard him mutter an apology, the laughter fading in the background as he moved away. When he came back on the line his voice was tense.

‘Charlie, what the hell?’ he said. A door clicked and the laughter was sealed out. ‘Where  are  you? Clayton has an all-points out on you. Your mom’s  house  blew up, and the last place anyone saw you was outside. No-one knew where you were.’

And apparently he’d not felt like looking for her. That still hurt, a bit. She swallowed, dry throated, and pretended it hadn’t. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘I want to keep it that way, for now.’

‘Even from Clayton?’

Apparently guilt was still working too. Good to know. Charlie pulled out onto the road, shouldering her way out through the thickening crowd of eager marks looking to get fleeced, fucked or found out. A thin black man in heels and a basque refused to move out of the way of her bumper. She veered around him, tyres bumping up the kerb. ‘Even Clayton. I’ve got a lead on something, but I have to stay down until it pans out. No-one at the station can know. It’s not secure.’

‘So why call me?’ he asked. ‘Charlie-’

She interrupted him before he could pity her again. ‘I need an address from the MMPD hive, but I can’t access it yet. Foster.’

‘Charlie, if my Dad finds out I’m helping you-’

‘He won’t from me.’

He sighed. ‘Foster. Hold on.’ She listened to the faint rustle and creak of him moving as he accessed the database. Charlie negotiated the streets and waited, digging chunks of plastic out of the steering wheel with nervous nails. ‘120b Vinca, in Delphi. Charlie, be careful. She doesn’t like cops. Back when I worked tech-crimes, the Captain liked her for two cop-killings, but we never had the evidence. Never had the bodies.’

‘I’m off-duty.’

‘I don’t think she’ll care.’

Charlie shrugged and hit the brakes hard, mashing her foot down to the floor, as a courier on a sleek, red and black bike came roaring around the corner. They nearly clipped the front headlight of the truck, and threw back a single finger salute for Charlie as they roared off.

‘Yeah, well, I’m hard to kill,’ Charlie said impatiently. ‘What’s the address, Jason.’

After a second he gave in and rattled off the address. It wasn’t far. Charlie pulled up the internal navigation of the Hive in her arm, the glowing grid of the city crawling through her field of vision. Hooper’s chop shop pulsed like a small, red ruby in the left quadrant.

‘Be careful, Charlie,’ Jason said. He hesitated, and then blurted out, ‘I know we ended...I know I could have done that better, Charlie, but I don’t want anything to happen to you.’

It would have been easier if he’d not said anything. Charlie flexed her fingers around the scarred rim of the steering wheel.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘It’s ok. Jason... ‘

‘Yeah, Charlie?’

‘Your Dad turns up at Foster’s? That won’t be ok,’ Charlie said. ‘Understand?’

It wouldn’t have been the first time. Every now and again, Neville would turn up to lay claim to a crime scene or steal an investigation he should have had no way of knowing was floundering. It wasn’t corruption, that Clayton wouldn’t have put up with no matter the pressure, just weakness. Kinda funny really, these days Charlie thought she’d find it easier to deal with corruption. 

‘Charlie...’

‘Oh, God, Jason,’ she said. ‘Don’t bother lying, not now.’

‘...he won’t hear it from me. I promise.’ 

She hung up unceremoniously. A quick audit confirmed there were eight messages from Clayton, waiting in the interface. Charlie tapped the first and last. Other than Clayton going from worried to angry, there wasn’t much difference in the content.

‘Charlie, where are you. If this is about Miles...I want to help.’

That was the problem though, wasn’t it. Help  who?  Right now,  Charlie  wasn’t sure whose side she was on. She wasn’t even sure if she was on her own side.

 

Foster was a chop jockey with a good pedigree. She’d been one of Baker’s techs, before he fired them all and moved into the Bakery full time. These days she worked out of a grubby-on-the-outside greasy spoon in the pits of Delphi, serving up grease-filmed coffee and vitamin enriched nutri-stew in matching extruded cellulose cups. Bodies moved in and out through the doors, but none of them lingered to enjoy their coffee.

A pinkly blonde doll of a woman, Foster had blonde curls scraped back from a high-boned forehead and square, battered hands. Her eyes were hard and blue, vaguely unfinished in their frame of pallid lashes.

Maybe she’d killed those cops, maybe not; she knew one when she saw them though.

‘We don’t serve the MMPD in here,’ she said flatly, crossing her arms. ‘What we got, it ain’t good for your health, kid.’

‘You’re not my mom,’ Charlie said, resting a hip on one of the duct-tape patched stools. ‘I don’t need you looking after me. I need someone that knows her way around Baker’s programming.’

That earned her a suspicious squint. ‘You know Baker?’

‘Yeah.’

‘OK,’ Maggie said, nodding slowly. Sharp white teeth caught her lower lip and she smiled around the bite. ‘Then you can really go fuck yourself, cop. I owe him, but nothing good.’

Charlie nodded and got up, walking over to the door. The street outside glittered with handheld lights, a ghetto of makeshift shelters creating their own network of narrow lanes and alleys as the cardless came creeping in for the night. Charlie nudged the door shut and pressed her thumb to the lock, sealing the lock with the MMPD codes. A second command bled black through the scratched, second hand windows, a curtain of nanites.

When she turned around, Foster was pointed a shotgun at her face. Charlie sighted along the barrel to the pale, determined face behind the stock.

‘Get out,’ Foster said. Her eyes narrowed, wrinkles finding a home at the corners. ‘Or you’ll find out how the nanites clear the waste out of the city’s sewers. First hand.’

Ignoring the gun, Charlie walked back to the counter and sat down. She laced her hands together in front of her, the outline of the gun blurring as it shifted closer to her face. 

‘I’m desperate,’ Charlie said flatly. ‘I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t. So we have two choices. Either you soak me for everything you can, claw out of me, or I get violent and make a mess of your set up here.’

Foster’s finger stroked the trigger. ‘Or I shoot you in the head and throw your body to the composters.’

Reaction time wasn’t really about how fast you could think or move. It was the gap between thinking and movement, and with the interface there wasn’t one. Charlie’s hand snapped up and grabbed the gun, fingers clenching and twisting. The metal crumpled and tore, Charlie’s nails popping through the metal like it was orange skin. Charlie’s mouth tightened and she bent the ruined barrel back, until it was pointing at Foster’s shocked face.

‘A lot of people have been pointing guns at me the last week,’ Charlie said. ‘I’m getting sick of it. Two choices. Pick one.’

Foster licked her lips and - very carefully - lowered the gun onto the burn-scarred counter. Her eyes flicked covetously to Charlie’s arm.

‘Nice work,’ she said.

‘It is. Pick.’

Still moving deliberately, Foster reached back and snapped the band out of her hair. ‘I get a look at that arm?’

Charlie snorted. ‘You get a look at my bank account and the MNR model bot I need rebooted,’ she said. ‘The arm’s safeguarded.’

The corner of Foster’s mouth curled in irritation. ‘Blacklist active?’

‘You won’t be able to turn on a light,’ Charlie confirmed, peeling her fingers out of the flattened gun. She glanced around the diner. ‘Of course, that might be a blessing in disguise.’

That got her a snort. Foster laced her fingers together and absent-mindedly popped her knuckles in a glissando of joint cracks. Maybe that was why Baker had fired her. It definitely but Charlie’s teeth on edge. Done with the percussion, Foster stripped off her apron and reached under the counter to grab a pair of enhanced goggles. The nanite lens swam wet and liquid in the cases as she snapped them on. ‘Yeah, well, you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. A MNR model, you say? I thought they were discontinued.’

Her voice was flat, but the quirk of her eyebrow turned it into a question. ‘Baker kept one on ice.’

‘Yeah, he would,’ Foster muttered, old venom in her voice. She settled the goggles over her eyes and nodded briskly. ‘Fine. Bring him through into the lab, I’ll have a look.’

She turned and walked away, throwing over her shoulder. ‘This is going to cost you, cop.’

Charlie let herself huff out a sigh, shoving a shaking, human hand back through her hair. ‘You’ve no idea what it’s cost,’ she muttered, shoving herself up off the stool.


	27. Chapter 27

The lab was a Gnat House. Foster had ripped out the innards of two derelict buildings, shoring the sagging walls up with lumpy runs of extruded fibre, had filled the space with scavenged hive tanks. Cables as thick as Charlie's thigh snaked over the floor and knotted around each other, siphoning power from one tank and feeding it to another. Some of the tanks were almost room temperature, others cast out heat intense enough to make Charlie sidestep away from them.

It was a huge, interdependent nanotech ecosystem, and just one minor failure away from a cascade event that would fill the streets with degraded biological goo. Charlie rubbed her fingers together, remembering the oddly silty texture of taken apart human. The back of her neck itched, the hairs prickling up on end. Half of her wanted to call this place in, get the satisfaction of watching it stripped out and shut down; the other half wanted to just get the hell out.

'How the hell has the City not shut you down?' she asked harshly. Her voice echoed in the big, dry space, the air dry on her tongue. 'This place has to glow in the dark on the heat sensors.'

Foster pulled her hair up on top of her head, snapping a rubber band around the tangled coils of it. 'Heat sinks in the roof,' she said, Turning around her mouth twisted in something that wasn't a smile. 'Friends in moderately high places. Same way you got that arm, while half the veterans from the Black Out Wars are still making do with Frankenstein grafts.'

'My arm isn't going to kill three square blocks if I crack the casing,' Charlie said, stepping over one of the trunk-cables.

'No?' Foster asked, cocking her head. 'You  sure of that? You actually got any idea how it works?'

Charlie shrugged. ‘Not really,’ she admitted, ‘but I had it half-blown off by a flammable round a couple of days ago. The worst thing that happened, was I got twitchy fingers.’

‘Damn, I’d love to get a look under the hood of that thing,’ Foster said, eyes lingering on Charlie’s arm. Then she shrugged and turned to the reinforced metal table, running her hand through Monroe’s cropped curls possessively. ‘I guess I’ll just have to make do with what I’ve got, story of my life.’

Charlie looked away, then back. She wasn’t sure what felt worse, looking at Monroe laid out like a corpse or pretending he wasn’t. 

‘I don’t need his guts rearranging,’ she said. ‘I just need him back on.’

‘That’s the deal,’ Foster agreed, dragging a laden trolley over. Steel glinted between her fingers as she picked up a pick and, with a butcher’s disregard for the meat, stuck it into the soft skin under Monroe’s eye. ‘What happened to it, anyhow? This is a battle-ready model, they have automatic reset for combat trauma situations.’

She flattened the heel of her hand against the pick handle and bore down, Monroe’s eyeball popping out of his socket. Charlie looked down at her boots, squeezing her eyes shut. After a second she made herself look back up. She wouldn’t have trusted Foster with her car, never mind the hard-wiring that made Monroe into Monroe.

‘He was injured in a fire fight,’ she said. ‘The nanites patched him up, but he just didn’t wake up.’

Foster snorted. ‘See? I told Baker, fucking Sanbourne a menace.’

‘Why?’ 

Foster looked up. ‘You, look at you. Injured? It’s a machine. You’re standing there worrying about it getting a hard reboot, but because of Sanbourne and his bio-mapping tech...you’re acting like it’s your puppy on the slab here.’

‘He’s my partner,’ Charlie said. The words sounded stark in the huge room of rip-off tech, and not even entirely true. ‘He’s my friend.’

Foster clicked her tongue and bent back over Monroe, working monofilament wires into his open socket. Images flashed up on the screens angled over the bay, flickering lights and sleek metal instead of bone.

‘Maybe you should get out more,’ Foster said. ‘Find a friend with a pulse.’

For a second, Charlie thought about a hard body shoved roughly against hers. The heat of his skin and the flutter of a pulse in his throat. Guilt pinched, odd and uncertain. What  did she have with Monroe? And seeing as Bass basically was him... Not helpful, she decided.

'Maybe you should get on with your job,' Charlie said. 'You'd getting paid to fix Monroe, not analyse me.'

'Call  that a freebie,' Foster said. She picked up a pair of interface gloves and drew them on carefully, mindful of the silk thin fabric and nano-circuitry glittering between the threads. Lacing her fingers together she squeezed, bedding the fabric down against her skin. 'Before the Blackout, it is what I did for a living.'

'A psych,' Charlie said flatly.

'Oh, not a fan,' Foster noted. 'I guess you got some mandated sessions after they hooked up with that bad boy. What was it they were worried about, dissociative pyschosis or evil hand syndrome.'

'Talking to you? Isn't a condition of getting my badge back.'

Foster pursed her lips and held her gloved hands up in surrender. 'Just making conversation.  I don't care if you cut off your ear one day because you think it is detachable.' She hunched down over Monroe, fingers twitching and occasionally craning her neck to see the screens. Images flicked on and off, sweeping from one screen to the other with the flick of her thumb.

Charlie stood for a while, shifting her weight wearily from one foot to the other. Then she leaned against a table, flinching upright when she realised her shoulder was nearly touching a tank crawling with a raw hive. Her skin itched, goose-pimples prickling the skin of her right arm. The unease kept her on her feet for a while longer, but between the last few, brutally long, days and the muscle-trembling toxins left by the upper… Charlie crouched down first, long muscles in her thighs tight, and leaned her elbows on her knees, watching the operation through a tangle of hair.

After a while, there didn’t seem much point in watching. If Foster was sabotaging anything, Charlie wouldn’t know until it was too late. She rolled back onto her backside, wrapping her arms around her legs, and dropped into an uneasy, unrestful doze. Her dreams were full of her Dad coming apart, breaking into dust in her hands as she tried to hold on to him, and the wet, bloody stones of Delphi.

In the dream, she knew that Clayton wasn’t coming to rescue her this time. That was a burned bridge.

Monroe was there, though, stoically moving the rocks off her. She tried to take his hands, something important and inchoate on her tongue, but Bass caught them instead. His thumbs were rough against her palms as he folded their arms over her chest.

‘Trust us,’  he said roughly in ear. ‘Do you trust us, Charlie?’

Rather than answer, Charlie woke up. She scrubbed the heel of her hand over sticky eyes and unkinked her legs, swearing mushily as her aching everything cracked and creaked. For a second, she just felt miserable and hung-over. Not unfamiliar. Then a sudden panic hit her and she scrambled gracelessly to her feet, grabbing a table to haul herself up and then startling away from it.

Foster looked up from what she was doing, blotting sweat from the corner of her eyes with her sleeve. Pale brows arched over towards her hairline, forehead creasing in ruler straight lines.

‘Welcome back, sleepyhead,’ she said.

Charlie slapped the dust off her jeans and looked around, eyes searching the walls for some glint of light. There was nothing. The windows were sealed with duct-tape and spraypainted black, the doors shrouded with sheets of black monofibre cloth. Charlie supposed that when you were running this sort of place, you didn’t want kerb appeal.

‘How long was I-?’ A jaw-cracking yawn interrupted her question, eyes squeezing shut and watering.

‘Out for the count?’ Foster asked. ‘Not long. Fifteen minutes….There’s ORS in the fridge. It’ll flush the upper out of your system.’

It didn’t seem worth protesting. Letting a hack-shop jockey like Foster get her fingers into MMPD proprietary hardware like Monroe was worth than popping a few uppers. She mouthed thanks and went over to the battered fridge, hooking the door open. The shelves inside were lined with re-filled sports bottles, sediment floating in them like dust. Charlie grabbed one and shook it, capping the spout with her thumb.

‘Is he ok?’

‘Well, I hate to break it to you, but it’s a machine,’ Foster said dryly. She shrugged under Charlie’s scowl and straightened up, reaching back to dig her fists into the small of her back.  ‘It saw something that its programming didn’t like, so its been put into suspension until Baker could reset its memory.’

Chewing the inside of her lip, Charlie worried the bottle between her hands. ‘Can you fix him?’

Foster leaned on the edge of the table, mouth quirked, and stared at the flickering circuitry laid out on the screen. ‘Maybe,’ she said eventually, drawing the syllables out. Wrinkles fanned out from the corners of her eyes as she squinted. 'Baker might think he's sly, but the bastard spends too much time patting himself on the back. If it was Matheson, now, your bot would have probably have slagged itself already. The bitch can program....'

Cutting herself off mid-sentence, Foster stared and then pointed a finger at Charlie. 'That's it. That's where I know you from. Matheson's kid. The one they put back together.'

Charlie sucked down half a bottle of sugar and salt. It tasted flat and gritty, medicinal as it hit the back of her throat, but it cut through the parched weariness. 'Like you said, I've got friends in moderately high places. Does it matter?'

'My fee just went up,' Foster said. 

‘Good for you, now wake him up. Or you don’t get anything.’

Foster smirked and walked over to one of the tanks, running interfaced fingers over the glass. The low hum of power that filled the lab took on a strained whine, the lights fluttering in and out of a brown-out. In the tank, the nanites flickered in alien strokes and strokes. Habit made Charlie go for her gun, only to find air and an empty belt-loop. She’d left it behind; the MMPD could track it. At the time, it had seemed like a good idea.

‘What are you doing?’ she demanded. ‘They aren’t safe.’

‘Why, because Baker says no?’ Foster asked curtly. ‘Or your mother? You ever think, Matheson, that they have a vested interest in being the only safety on the streets.’

‘Yeah,’ Charlie admitted. ‘I’ve also seen what happens when rogue nanites get loose.’

Foster snorted. ‘Well, if it puts your mind at ease, this a Matheson approved Hive. I’ve just...tweaked it a bit. Here and there.’ Her hands hesitated and her face, profile lit by the restless Hive, was tired. ‘A friend of mine, he worked for Baker too. He showed me a few tricks, useful ones, to get at the core programming. It’s not easy, but it works.’

The front wall of the tank melted away and the hive crawled out. You couldn’t see them - a full Hive could have a 100,000 nanites in it and still be invisible to the naked eye - but Charlie imagined she could feel them. Or maybe the chill was just fear. She stepped back, as if that would help, and rubbed her arms. Goosebumps itched against her fingertips.

Foster ignored her, gloved hands brushing the cloud into place along the sprawled length of Monroe’s body from toe to short, dirty-blonde curls. Blood crusted her nostrils from interface-overload, but she kept moving. 

‘Stand back,’ she told Charlie. ‘This is going to be...erratic.’

She pushed Monroe’s eye back into the socket, shoving with her thumb to get it to pop into place, then rested her fingers against his temples. Her lips moved, silently counting down. Three... Two…

Charlie stepped backwards, bracing herself against...whatever was going to happen.

Dry lips shaped the ‘one’, and the screens flashed brilliant white, then went black. Monroe spasmed. His feet battered the table, denting and cracking the metal, and his body twitched and juddered. It was a seizure at inhuman speed, scraping skin off his arms and legs as they ground against the table.

Charlie started forward and stopped, hands clenching into fists so tight her nails cut into her palm. The thick metal table ripped like foil, shards of metal sticking out like knives, and a strange sound squeezed out of Monroe’s throat. It was somewhere between an electronic screech and a human scream.

Then he went limp, head rolling to the side as Foster moved her hands. His eyes blinked over, blue as ever but empty. Charlie bit her lip.

‘Monroe?’

He blinked twice, and sat up. ‘Charlie,’ he said, voice rough and familiar. He glanced at Foster, peeling the gloves off with her teeth, and then around at the lap. ‘Are we in Mexico? Last time I woke up somewhere this weird, I was in Mexico.’

Charlie laughed and threw herself at him, her fists digging into his back as she hugged him desperately. ‘Idiot,’ she said. Pulling back, she thumped his shoulder. ‘Don’t do that again. You scared me.’

He tugged her hair. ‘You? Scared? That’s weirder than...wherever this hellhole is.’


End file.
